RALPH WALDO 
EMERSON 



BY 



O. W. FIRKINS 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLHSr COMPANY 

1915 






COPYRIGHT, I915, BY O. W. FIRKINS 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published May iqi^ 



ff?S~ 

m I 1915 



;i,A406070 



PREFATORY NOTE 

A NEW venture into a field from which biography and 
criticism have drawn repeated and ample harvests may 
avert the charge of impertinence by pointing to the 
fresh materials in the ten-volume edition of the Jour- 
nals , 1909-14, brought out under the careful and taste- 
ful editorship of Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo 
Emerson Forbes. Of this copious and varied matter the 
present work has made extensive use. References to 
Emerson's works in this volume are based exclusively 
on the "Centenary" edition. Essays and smaller prose 
compositions generally are referred to by title followed 
by volume and page in the "Centenary" edition: thus. 
Fate, VI, 41. Poems are classed under the general title 
Poems followed by the appropriate volume and page. 
The following abbreviations have been used: Jour, for 
"Journals"; "Cabot," for J. E. Cabot's well-known and 
admirable Memoir; E. in C, for Dr. Emerson's Emer- 
son in Concord, and C. E, C. for Carlyle-Emerson Cor- 
respondence. Garnett's Emerson, Holmes's Ralph Waldo 
Emerson, Professor Woodberry's Emerson, Conway's 
Emerson at Home and Abroad, are referred to by the 
names of their authors, Garnett, Holmes, Woodberry, 
and Conway. 



CONTENTS 

I. The Crescent Man 1 

n. "Full Circle" 45 

III. The "Westering Wheel" 115 

IV. The Harvest 157 

' V. Emerson as Prose- Writer 227 

' VI. Emerson as Poet 274 

Vn. Emerson's Philosophy 297 

Vin. FORESHADOWINGS > 360 

Index 375 

The frontispiece is an engraving of Mr. Daniel C. Frenches masterly 
statue of Emerson which was placed in the Concord Public Library in 
191^, and is here reproduced by the courtesy of the sculptor. 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 

CHAPTER I 

THE CRESCENT MAN 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the first of American 
thinkers, was born in the third year of the last cen- 
tury, May 25, 1803, in the "parish house" of the First 
(Unitarian) Church of Boston, of which his father, Wil- 
liam Emerson, was minister. It is the pastime of his 
biographers to trace back his paternal ancestry through 
many stalwart and striking figures, mainly clerical, to 
its first clear emergence into the light of history in the 
sombre and troubled England of the Puritans and the 
Stuarts. The source of the family's earliest distinction 
is one Peter Bulkeley, "Rector of Woodhill or Odell in 
Bedfordshire," a man of admirable scholarship, piety, 
and contumacy, who found the breadth of the Atlantic 
the only adequate symbol of the divergence between 
his views and those of the dogmatic and despotic Arch- 
bishop Laud. Bulkeley came to America in 1634 and 
founded in the yet virgin wilderness the town of Con- 
cord; later on, his race, in the person of a granddaughter, 
allied itself with the Emersons, a stock in the fame of 
whose heroism and genius the town and the founder 
were both to participate. 

The race maintained its high tradition in the New 
World; and its unbroken record of worth and distinc- 



9, RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

tion for two centuries or more is as intelligible as it is 
peculiar. To the discipline of persecution succeeded the 
safeguard of poverty; in that hardy and frugal com- 
munity, the conditions which make ability its own 
Nemesis had not yet come into being, and success could 
not emasculate the energies out of which it had sprung. 
The men were collegians, scholars, reasoners, but what 
most impresses us in the Emersons and in the congenial 
stocks of the Moodys and the Blisses which brought 
their affluents to the common stream, is the resolute 
stanchness, the decisive, almost imperious, tempera- 
ment appropriate to a community in which the laymen 
were half priests and the priests were wholly and con- 
spicuously men. The vital anecdotes in the annals of 
these families smack of determination and manhood. 
Joseph Emerson, great-grandfather of Ralph Waldo, 
prays each night that none of his descendants may be 
rich, and all but martyrs his children to the fervor of his 
zeal for scholarship. The excellent Samuel Moody, an- 
other great-grandfather, gives away his wife's only pair 
of shoes from her bedside, and pursues his backsliding 
parishioners into the alehouse on Saturday nights, and 
drags them back to decency by the collar. William 
Emerson, the grandfather, minister at Concord and 
builder of the Old Manse, was active in the encourage- 
ment of revolution, and was only withheld by the urgency 
of his parishioners from engaging in person in the fateful 
skirmish of the 19th April, 1775: they could not prevent 
him from dying a year or two later of camp-fever at 
Ticonderoga, where he served as chaplain to the Revo- 
lutionary army. Daniel Bliss, father-in-law of the first 



I 



I 



THE CRESCENT MAN S 

William Emerson, stands out "as a flame of fire" even 
in the decorum of an epitaph. 

One is interested to find in these progenitors of Emer- 
son the combination of a strong individuality, border- 
ing at times on the daring and the eccentric, with a great 
capacity and propensity for close and cordial relations 
with their fellow-men. Their wilfulness suggested the 
autocrat rather than the rebel, and their power of im- 
posing even their peculiarities upon their associates was 
so great as to relieve them from the pitiful alternative 
of purchasing independence by solitude or social inter- 
course by subserviency. 

The interest of this pedigree is undeniable, but its 
worth as an explanation of Emerson might be readily 
overrated. The point of wonder — and therefore of 
difficulty — in every such series is the step from distinc- 
tion to eminence, and the wonder and the difficulty are 
much the same, whether the distinction be concen- 
trated in the parents or scattered through a train of 
ancestors. The rise of tableland into peak is in no degree 
explained by the measurement of the expanse of miles 
through which the tableland reaches back in the sur- 
rounding country. Indeed, the procrastination of a 
race which for nearly two hundred years had gone on 
uniformly attaining power and consistently missing 
greatness might be held to create a presumption rather 
against than for the belated emergence of genius. Even 
if the great descendant be the synthesis of traits that 
have existed separately in various ancestors — and this 
cannot be securely affirmed of the Emersons and the 
Bulkeleys — the synthesizing force remains unexplained. 



4 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

A ray of light is afforded by the curious similarity of 
moral type exhibited by Emerson and his two short- 
lived but remarkable younger brothers, Edward and 
Charles. But the natural inference — the inference that 
would be peremptory were it not impossible, namely, 
that the union of William Emerson and Ruth Haskins, 
the parents, produced that coalition of merits which at 
once bound these lads together and divided them from 
their forefathers — is refuted by the anticipation of this 
type in the person of the "fiery and affectionate sibyl," 
the aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, daughter of William 
Emerson the elder and Phebe Bliss. To account for 
Emerson, even tentatively and imperfectly, we must 
assume that the period as well as the stock was procrea- 
tive, that the high result sprang from the impact of new 
forces in literature, philosophy, and religion on a race 
in which conscience and vigor had flourished for six 
generations. Even so the mystery which selected one 
generous stock out of fifty or a hundred others for the 
receptacle and conduit of this redemptive influence is 
inaccessible to our research. 

The agreeable fallacy which regards a family as a sav- 
ings bank in which profits accumulate and virtue and in- 
tellect are deposited at compound interest may be dis- 
proved in the Emerson case by the condition of the 
intellectual and moral balance in the years that precede 
the rise to opulence. The parents of Emerson are less 
individual than the majority of his ancestors. William 
Emerson, the younger son of the fervid Concord revo- 
lutionist and his wife, born Phebe Bliss, completed his 
course at Harvard College in 1789, became a clergyman 



THE CRESCENT MAN 5 

almost by racial necessity, was summoned in 1799 from 
a parish in the town of Harvard to the pastorate of the 
First (Unitarian) Church of Boston, where he acquired 
that kind of distinction which after the lapse of a gen- 
eration is hardly distinguishable from commonplace. 
He was enterprising, eloquent, and popular, the sort of 
man whose name is, so to speak, indigenous in the min- 
utes of learned societies, in the roll of subscribers to in- 
fantine reviews or venerable charities, in select but not 
modish visiting lists. The data thus far collected are for 
the most part honorable, conventional, and uninterest- 
ing: two points, or at most three, disclose the man be- 
hind the featureless mask of the scholar and the gen- 
tleman. He had — what is valuable in any man and 
almost priceless in an exemplar of the aggregated virtues 
— a vein of gay, capricious, self -mocking humor, which, 
we are allowed to hope, lightened his very deathbed with 
the gleams of its playfulness. The second point of in- 
terest is his unaccomplished project of establishing in 
Washington a church which should excise from its quali- 
fications for membership every reference to profession 
of faith. The third matter is a score of arresting mono- 
syllables, recorded by Mr. Cabot in his faultless "Mem- 
oir," which sum up both a character and a situation: 
"We are poor and cold, and have little meal, and little 
wood, and little meat, but, thank God, courage enough." 
The mother of Emerson, the "pious and amiable Ruth 
Haskins," the daughter of Mr. John Haskins of Boston, 
was a woman who contributed much more to the welfare 
of her family than to the sustenance or enlivenment of 
biographers. She becomes clear to the eye momentarily 



6 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

in her old age by virtue of a single plastic phrase in her 
son's letter to Carlyle: "My mother, whitest and mild- 
est, most conservative of ladies, whose only exception 
to her universal preference for old things is her son." 

The photograph in the "Journals'* is hardly winning; 
the smile seems clamped to the face. The praise that is 
freely dispensed is rather zealous than cordial, and in 
the single epistolary fragment (addressed to her son 
William at Harvard) which has come to our notice she 
shows that inexorable elevation which it is easier to es- 
teem than to forgive. These impressions are, however, 
misleading; or, at least, they comprise but half the 
truth. A single retort particularized in the "Journals" 
— precious because solitary — vouches for her partici- 
pation in that mother-wit which seemed to encrust the 
very beams and rafters of the viviJfic Emersonian domi- 
ciles. The really decisive humanizing touch is in the 
words she addressed to the truant William and Ralph: 
"My sons, I have been in agony for you!" The arraign- 
ment of a society and a century is contained in the 
"bliss" which this disclosure of undreamt-of tenderness 
induced in the heart of the younger son. 

A father who dies when his eldest child is ten years 
old (William Emerson's life was cut short in May, 1811) 
will but imperfectly influence his sons, and the keeper 
of a boarding-house, to which bondage Mrs. Emerson 
was reduced by the poverty that followed widowhood, is 
sometimes divided from her children by the very exer- 
tions which she makes in their behalf. The quickening 
force in the lives of the five young boys who shared the 
biting restraints and the high privileges of that humble 



THE CRESCENT MAN 7 

fireside was undoubtedly the father's sister, Mary Moody 
Emerson, a woman in whom that fusion of the religious, 
the intellectual, and the poetic instinct which became 
the index of the Emersonian breed had already made 
itself a fact. Her fame is slight, and, even .in its slight- 
ness, vicarious, but it is doubtful if America can point 
to another woman of comparable originality and eleva- 
tion. In spite of passionate energy and dramatic con- 
trasts, her personality is hard to focus: it presents the 
same combination of vividness and blur which is found 
in the confused magnificence of the few published speci- 
mens of her iridescent and mazy rhetoric. We are told 
that the Calvinism of her forefathers had become lumi- 
nous in the white heat of her enkindling poetic imagina- 
tion, and that afterwards it had been consumed and 
turned to ashes by the very ardor of its incandescence. 
She was a rebel who rebelled against her own revolt. 
As Emerson himself says: She "in all companies and on 
all occasions, and especially with these darling nephews 
of her hope and pride, extolled and poeticized this be- 
loved Calvinism. Yet all the time she doubted and 
denied it, and could not tell whether to be more glad or 
sorry to find that these boys were irremediably born to 
the adoption and furtherance of the new ideas." 

She had in some respects the richest endowment of 
her race. In contrast with the nephew to whom she com- 
municated so freely of her spirit, she possessed a South- 
ern luxuriance of temperament incarnated in a Northern 
hardihood of constitution. She was a creature of ex- 
tremes no less than of contradictions, and real as she 
strove to be, real as she indisputably was, her whole 



8 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

character bore the stamp of the spectacular and the ex- 
aggerated. She had an eye which no weakness escaped, 
and a tongue which fairly substantiated the diatribes 
of St. James on the subject of that member. She hated 
an unreasoning obedience to custom to the point of be- 
ing ready to replace it by an unreasoning disobedience; 
she thought everything complaisant that was not brutal, 
and the decorums fled at her approach. She had whim- 
sies in respect to the wearing of her shroud as a day- 
gown which might have stepped forth bodily from the 
tales of a German romanticist or the memoirs of a 
French actress. Her often quoted counsel to her neph- 
ews, "Always do what you are afraid to do," with its 
plenitude of grandeur and its tincture of absurdity, 
illustrates the mixture of elements in a nature where the 
virtues rather rioted than flourished. Her career demon- 
strated both the worth of independence and the perils 
to which that trait is exposed in the absence of the intel- 
lectual and moral counter-weights, common sense and 
love, which qualified the self-trust of her illustrious 
nephew. It is difficult yet necessary to grasp firmly 
the fact that this nature which seems at first sight to 
vibrate between the ridiculous and the forbidding, which 
seems to owe its failure to be wholly repulsive to the sav- 
ing grace which kept it half burlesque, was the channel 
through which ideals of self-forgetfulness and worship 
and heroism flowed into the souls of receptive and gen- 
erous boys of whom one was the destined teacher of 
America. 

That such an influence did not upset in the same 
measure in which it uplifted is ^highly creditable to the 



THE CRESCENT MAN 9 

sanity of the young Emersons. There were circumstances 
in their lives that might have aggravated the hurtful- 
ness of any influence which their own genius could not 
countervail. There were five boys (omitting three chil- 
dren who died in infancy) : William, born in 1801 ; Ralph 
Waldo, 1803; Edward Bliss, 1805; Robert Bulkeley, 
1807; Charles Chauncy, 1808. They lived at the same 
time on the border of the empyrean and (if certain anec- 
dotes be typical) on the edge of starvation. If they were 
saints by choice, they were ascetics by necessity. The 
father's death had cut down the income; ^ve mouths 
are five mouths, though they belong to mystics and 
poets; the Harvard education which was epidemic in the 
family had to be foreseen and prearranged from the 
start. Destitution, we may suppose, was never imminent : 
New England thrift within, reenforced by measured 
but unfailing New England generosity from without, 
coped gallantly with the stringencies of a really difficult 
situation. It is said that Mrs. Ripley, a lifelong friend 
of the family, on one occasion found Aunt Mary trying 
I to beguile the hunger of her youthful nephews by sto- 
[ lies of Spartan fortitude, an attempt which, practised 
upon growing boys, confirms the reputation of that wo- 
: man for intrepidity. There was one winter when Ralph 
and Edward wore the same overcoat to school on alter- 
nate days: half protected from the winter, they were 
still more defenceless against the biting social atmos- 
phere which nipped their ears in the jests of pitiless 
companions. 

The difference between their means and their station 
was the anomalous point in their circumstances. Belong- 



10 RALPH WALDO EMEESON 

ing by birth and education to the aristocracy of Boston, 
yet caught in the gripe of actual indigence, they had 
plenty of correctives both for their pride and for their 
self-abasement. A training which would have disen- 
chanted the sour, embittered the uncharitable, or sen- 
sualized (by reaction) the fleshly, confirmed these lads 
in the cheeriness, sweetness, and spirituality of their 
inborn dispositions by shifting the centre of life from 
the outward to the inward world. In relation to practi- 
cal values, the schooling was invaluable since it empha- 
sized the necessity of material things at the same time 
that it diminished their significance. A man who as a 
boy has driven his mother's cow to pasture through the 
streets (or paths) of Boston is safe from the danger of 
viewing that variously related animal exclusively from 
the point of view of Virgil or Theocritus or the not dis- 
similar point of view of Troyon or Rosa Bonheur. A 
boy who has been solemnly rebuked by a scorner of 
trifles for the reckless investment of six cents in the tak- 
ing out of a book from a circulating library and who has 
returned the book unread as an act of atonement for his 
prodigality may come in time to view a nickel as an illu- 
sion, but not as an illusion to be disrespectfully treated. 
A boy who has done housework in early childhood may 
blossom into an idealist in later life, but will remain 
capable of the severity of reminding more speculative 
idealists of the existence of the woodpile in the yard or 
the unweeded patch in the garden. 

A fact of great moment to the outlook of the mature 
Emerson upon life was the virtual identity of his own 
aspirations and motives with those of the family which 



THE CRESCENT MAN 11 

constituted, in those early days, his society, his world. 
A nature as rare as his often finds itself a stranger in its 
own home, and learns the lesson of solitariness from its 
games with brothers and sisters or even on the mother's 
knee. Our cohesion with our kind depends largely on 
the mental image we frame to ourselves of the average 
man; the man we face at the turning of the comer, the 
quivis, the any-one-you-please, — in the dialect of the 
sidewalk, "the other fellow." Emerson pictured this 
man all his life more or less in the likeness of his earliest 
associates, and the presumption that man was a religious 
animal and that all other appetences are makeshifts and 
preliminaries fixed, and fixed finally, the basis of expec- 
tation. The facts that constitute the case for misan- 
thropy, he saw — and stated — with a clearness and 
vigor which misanthropy could not approach, but he 
was so framed that no array of hostile facts — not even 
facts of his own discovery and propagation — ever dis- 
turbed his loyalty to his preconceptions; he could admit 
all, because he conceded nothing. 

The Emerson boys, according to the oracular Aunt 
Mary, were "born to be educated." Ralph Waldo fol- 
lowed in this respect the traditions of his house, but his 
proficiency in technical "lessons" seems never to have 
been remarkable. At the age of three his backwardness 
in readiug became the subject of regretful comment from 
a disappointed father. He passed from infant schools 
under feminine instruction to the sterner tutelage of one 
Lawson Lyon, and was thence duly advanced, at the 
age of ten, to the Boston Latin School, then in charge of 
the excellent Benjamin Apthorp Gould. Little that is 



12 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

distinctive is preserved to us in the sparse records of his 
school life. Old schoolmates have obligingly searched 
their memories of the little Ralph's early days, and have 
shared the meagre proceeds with thankful biographers; 
but they are all manfully candid as to the mediocrity 
of the results. Judge Loring fortunately remembers 
that his compositions were "graceful," and Dr. Furness 
triumphs in the certainty that his reading of verse was 
impressive. Dr. Furness's name recalls the pleasant 
fact that two of Emerson's lifelong friendships — those 
with Samuel Bradford and the excellent doctor him- 
self — date back to the semi-infantile days of Lawson 
Lyon: a certain woman-like daintiness and chariness 
in the hold of Emerson upon his friends was balanced 
by a truly masculine tenacity. 

Mr. Cabot has printed in his "Memoir" a letter writ- 
ten by the young Ralph, at the age of ten, to his Aunt 
Mary, a touchingly plain and frank recital, sober but a 
little restive perhaps in its sobriety, combining formality 
with simplicity in a quaint partnership, and relieving 
the sedate with a touch of the florid. He mentions in 
this letter a private writing-school taught by a Mr. 
Webb to which he betook himself with theoretic regu- 
larity during the first part of the noon intermission al- 
lowed by Mr. Gould. His son. Dr. Edward Emerson, 
records his truancies from this distasteful writing-school 
with a certain quiet triumph in the opportunity it gives 
us for branding as libellous the charge that certain 
biographers bring against Emerson of adhering with 
undeviating and unfeeling regularity to the injunctions 
of the moral law. The seekers for infirmity may be 



THE CRESCENT MAN 13 

further comforted by the information that he was capa- 
ble of angry thoughts when his brothers excelled him 
in the home spelling-class, and that he read with gusto 
contraband books in the hours of study at the Latin 
School. 

A taste for literature was part of Emerson's paternal 
and national or quasi-national inheritance. This was 
the place and the hour of the sanctity of literature, of 
its elevation, as it were, to the rank of an inferior or 
ancillary religion. Mary Moody Emerson was, for her 
time and sex, profoundly read, and the lads' cradles 
were rocked to the sound of names which for most men 
are bound up with nothing earlier or more intimate 
than the encyclopaedia or the college curriculum. They 
grew up in a domestic circle in which insensibility to 
literature would have been relegated to the same cate- 
gory with blindness or inability to walk. The taste for 
eloquence surpassed, if possible, the interest in litera- 
ture, and Sunday morning derived a vivid excitement 
from the transit from church to church to hunt out the 
particular congregation to which Edward Everett, the 
idol of the day, was speaking. Ralph not only formed 
his mind and his ear to the appreciation of English 
verse, but wrote rhymes at this period with a facility 
which the laborious artist of later years must have re- 
called with envy. His knack at rhyme was said to have 
been "a matter of modest family pride"; readers of the 
available extracts will conclude that fellow-feeling was 
clearly strong among the Emersons. 

In August, 1817, at the age of fourteen, the young 
Emerson entered Harvard College, an institution which. 



14 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

after almost two hundred years of life, had not yet 
emerged from its own adolescence. Poor as the Emersons 
were, they never failed to command, in one way or an- 
other, the subsidies required for their intellectual prog- 
ress, and the needful aids to the half-penniless boy 
were punctually forthcoming in the shape of the office 
of president's freshman (or messenger), the opportunity 
to wait at table (Uked and yet disHked), and an occa- 
sional scholarship or tutorship. His services in the jBrst 
two capacities paid his lodging and three fourths of his 
board. The family resources remained meagre, and the 
thirty dollars received as the second Boylston prize for 
declamation, which he had hoped to devote to the pur- 
chase of a shawl or other gift for his mother, was con- 
sumed in the replenishment of the gaping flour-barrel. 
Circumstances like these seem superlatively fitted to 
call forth the industry and earnestness of a grateful 
and conscientious boy, but, curiously enough, Emerson's 
college life, as we gather it from the "Journals" and the 
memoirs, seems pitched in the key of irresponsibility. 
Gay or frivolous he assuredly was not; but he acted as 
he could; he let things — more specifically, his own na- 
ture — take their course. In his pursuit and in his neg- 
lect of his studies, he was without system and without 
ostentation. For the fault — natural to genius — of 
not being a very good student, he did not even offer the 
customary apology of being a very bad one. His final 
rank was about midway in the class. He profited by the 
instruction of three or four congenial professors who 
were freshening the ancient routine with importations 
from the ways and means of Europe. He practised com- 



THE CRESCENT MAN 15 

position with diligence, won three prizes, two for dis- 
sertations and one for public speaking, and the office of 
class poet, after many vicissitudes, found a shelter from 
its wayfarings at his charitable door. There is no reason 
to suppose that he had any captious objection to stand- 
ing first in his class, had the opportunity come in his 
way. Indeed, it is highly probable that he sincerely 
sympathized with the disappointment of his parents 
and tutors in the failure of that singular young man, 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, to Kve up to the expectations 
of his friends. But toward the curriculum — toward his 
college life as a whole — he seemed curiously passive. 
Harvard lay in his way, and his route as the descendant 
of Calvinistic ministers was foreordained. Whatever in 
the prescribed exercises suited his temper was gratefully 
received; the alien elements were gently, perhaps com- 
punctiously, put aside. He had probably not yet shaped 
a rule or theory out of his instinct of self-reliance; he 
obeyed his constitution, and watched results. 

Emerson's peculiar social temper, markedly gregari- 
ous but only half companionable, is manifest even in 
these early days. He appears to have been a quietly 
assiduous member of a small literary and debating so- 
ciety, to which conjecture assigns the flamboyant name 
of the Pythologians. Three little traits, Emerson's 
adhesion to his class in a temporary withdrawal from 
college, his occasional use of wine (with theundesired 
effect, however, of retarding the tongue it was meant to 
accelerate), his participation, according to Moncure D. 
Conway in a Conventicle club in which the parts, or at 
least the names, of parsons and archbishops were trav- 



16 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



^! 



estied, should give a quietus to any suspicion that he 
belonged with the precisians or the pietists. A point of 
unique interest is the curious spell which a younger 
student, Martin Gay of Hingham, flung over a tempera- 
ment, not highly subject, even in youth, to the romantic 
suggestiveness of personality. Emerson is cool and wary 
even in his willing self-enthralment, and is said never to 
have sought the acquaintance of the younger boy, di- 
vining perhaps that the same difference which made 
the bond might form the barrier. 

Emerson's life, even in youth, lacked turning-points; 
the periods of his existence passed one into another by 
insensible transitions, or rather constituted one period, 
coextensive with his life. Of these four college years, 
from fourteen to eighteen, so restless and reconstructive 
in many lives, it is impossible to record a single defini- 
tive and manifest change. A certain passivity, which 
must not be confounded with intellectual stagnation — 
even a certain impassibility — marks this epoch of his 
life. His youth is almost more evasive than his boyhood. 
When Rufus Dawes describes Emerson as "a spiritual- 
looking boy in blue nankeen," — the tantalizing phrase 
which comes from an innocent friend, but might so 
easily have been put forth by a sly enemy, — he sets a 
real, if somewhat whimsical, image before our eyes. (It 
suggests without any intention and probably without 
any justice the avidity with which the admiring but dis- 
trustful and disquieted townsfolk lay hold of any social 
eccentricity on the part of the prophet or saint.) But 
nothing so clear as this is reported of the imponderable 
college days. Reminiscences help us to some image of 



THE CRESCENT MAN 17 

the half -inviting, half-defensive benignity which marked 
Emerson's bearing in the execution of his duties, and 
John Lowell Gardner, in a letter printed in Dr. Holmes's 
"Life," has a word that really helps: "A certain flash 
when he said anything that was more than usually 
worthy to be remembered." One thanks Mr. Gardner 
for his "flash," admitting us to the secret of those preg- 
nant and fruitful activities carried on in the shelter and 
the shadow of that gracious stillness which an untutored 
or sardonic eye might have mistaken for quiescence. 
Even the "Journals" of the period hardly confute this 
error; they fail to be communicative even when they are 
voluble; they are mostly seK-imposed exercises, some- 
times essaying burlesque, sometimes grandiloquence 
(without difference of outcome), sometimes set themes 
that bring back to us the formal exactness of the aca- 
demic quadrangle. Nothing in the contents of these 
early "Journals" evinces so much maturity as his per- 
severance in composing them. 

The needier Harvard students were accustomed to 
fill the intervals of the college year and the gaps in their 
budgets by the practice of school-keeping. Emerson, 
among the other sons of the house, had succumbed to 
the ungenial necessity. Hatred of routine was inherent 
in a temper to which openness to impressions, the search 
for opportunities, was an attraction as imperative as the 
highroad to a gypsy. He could live willingly the simplest, 
the most domestic, the most unvarying life, if his mind 
were unhindered in its celestial vagabondage. But the 
imposition of a schedule drew from him perhaps the 
most violent invective which ever came from his pen 



18 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

on a topic merely personaL He says in the "Journal" 
for December 15, 1820: — 

"I claim and clasp a moment's respite from this irk- 
some school to saunter in the fields of my own wayivard 
thought. The afternoon was gloomy and preparing to 
snow — dull, ugly weather. But when I came out from 
the hot, steaming, stoved, stinking, dirty, A-B spelling- 
school-room, I almost soared and mounted the atmos- 
phere at breathing the free magnificent air, the noble 
breath of life. It was a delightful exhilaration but it 
soon passed off." 

The chafing is violent, but exhausts itself in half a 
sentence. 

Emerson has the capacity for disgust which pertains 
to delicate tempers and the susceptibility to weariness 
which besets the power to enjoy vividly and keenly. 
His patience in the latter respect was now to be tested. 
His brother William, after graduating from Harvard at 
seventeen, was prepared at eighteen, as Waldo with en- 
dearing satire recounts, to "enact the 'grave' experi- 
enced professor, who had seen much of life, and was 
prepared to give the overflowing of his wisdom and ripe 
maturity to the youth of his native city." 

He had chosen as the mise-en-scene of his benevolent 
omniscience a school for young ladies of the select circles 
of Boston, which he conducted, with oldtime simplicity, 
in his mother's house. The post of assistant, and, 
later on, the sole charge of the establishment for a year, 
was confided to the anxious and rather rueful Waldo 
(the family usage substituted "Waldo" for "Ralph" at 
about this period). 



THE CRESCENT MAN 19 

A French comedy- writer or, for that matter, our own 
Mr. Howells, could have educed a delicate farce from 
the embarrassments of the sage of eighteen, the scion of 
a masculine household and the nursling of a college for 
men, in his first encounters with young ladies whom sex 
and caste and years and even an aptitude for satire 
combined to render socially redoubtable. His admira- 
tions for his pupils, which he chivalrously recalls in an 
address made at their invitation many years later, and 
which doubtless might be compared to the fallings of 
snow upon wool, were not of a sort to temper his im- 
patience with a confining and unpalatable task. He 
speaks of "miserable employment" and a "hopeless 
schoolmaster," though, possibly, the bitterness of these 
phrases voices the restlessness and melancholy of youth 
quite as much as his relation to the decried calling. Re- 
ports vary as to his efficiency in teaching; on the whole, 
one infers that his success was moderate. The "subjec- 
tion" in which he may very well have held the class of 
minds with whom gentleness is authoritative is quite 
compatible with his self-confessed "vexation of spirit 
when the will of the pupils was a little too strong for the 
will of the teacher." In all such judgments a double 
allowance must be made, — an allowance for Emerson's 
own propensity for the superlative in passages of self- 
disparagement and for the proneness of his admirers to 
luxuriate in the same fault when the matter in hand is 
laudation. 

The school-keeping was pecuniarily fruitful; the bio- 
graphers do not help us to understand the legerdemain 
by which a profession ordinarily so niggardly to its ap- 



20 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

prentices was made to yield in three years between two 
and three thousand dollars in actual savings to this un- 
practised young idealist. This surely entitled the "mis- 
erable employment" to some forbearance, and Emerson, 
who was, we think, in spite of his constitutional poise 
and serenity, a lover in his way of moods and their per- 
mutations, wrote some spirited and cheerful letters at 
this period to his former classmate, Mr* John B. Hill. 
They are more normal in their ydut£ftiV;lgkyety and 
satire than almost any other of Enaersonts Jetters, — 
products of a serious mind certainly, l)ut of a mind 
clever likewise, aware of its cleverness, arid human 
enough to find no displeasure in the consciousness. 

The Emerson household was falling in these years 
into that state of partial deliquescence which the mi- 
grations to college, the maturing of the sons, and the 
exigencies of illness are prone to bring about in the 
American family. The headquarters shift from Boston 
to Canterbury and from Canterbury to Cambridge, and 
the mobility of the individual units was considerable. 
William, the eldest son, went to Gottingen to study di- 
vinity, submitted the New England creed to the action 
of the German solvents, was advised by the facile and 
diplomatic Goethe to ignore his doubts, to temporize 
and conform, and returned to New England to remember 
nothing except his descent from the uncompromising 
Peter Bulkeley. He renounced the clerical vocation, 
and became a successful lawyer in New York; not 
emerging very often into direct view in the progress of 
his brother's life, he impresses us always as one of its 
real though invisible stays. The affectionate but feeble- 



THE CRESCENT MAN 21 

minded Bulkeley was to be transferred to other guar- 
dianship. Edward, after a resplendent career at Har- 
vard, was forced to give up his school-keeping and his law 
studies, and to seek renovation for his failing powers in 
a voyage to the Mediterranean. Charles was now study- 
ing in Harvard. Meanwhile, the combined influence of 
ancestral tradition, of maternal wishes intensified and 
disquieted by the withdrawal of William, and of his 
own maturing cha^racter and ambition was gently but 
steadily ui-ging the pondering Waldo toward the choice 
of the ministry as a career. He began his studies at 
Divinity Hall, Cambridge, in February, 1825. 

To call Emerson's work at Cambridge desultory 
would be to deserve the reproach not of severity but 
of obsequiousness. He was interrupted and impeded at 
every turn — by weakness of eyesight, by rheumatism, 
by the menace of lung fever, by the repeated necessity 
of falling back upon the obnoxious resource of school- 
teaching. On October 10, 1826, however, at the close 
of what the elasticity of language permits us to call his 
studies, he was authorized to preach by the Middlesex 
Association of Ministers. 

The approbation of the ministers, even in the ab- 
sence of the usual safeguard of examination, is not in- 
explicable. The only person whose endorsement of the 
proceedings excites a little curiosity and question is the 
young candidate himself. How did the young thinker, 
who only six years later was to abandon a distinguished 
pastorate on a far from momentous point of ritual, and 
who only twelve years later was to convulse New Eng- 
land with the audacity and trenchancy of his heresies. 



22 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

bring himself in 1826 to subscribe to a faith with which 
his accord, even in that early season, was undoubtedly 
imperfect? He copies into his "Journal" in 1823 his 
aunt's almost scoffing reference to some of Dr. Chan- 
ning's views, though his own esteem for the man's ideas 
and eloquence is repeatedly attested. His brother's 
defection, moreover, must have deepened his thought- 
fulness. 

There were, however, many impulsions of an op- 
posite bearing. The young man, whose years at this 
decisive moment numbered only twenty-three, did not 
approach the Unitarian ministry as an outsider or 
pioneer: the privilege, the investiture, was hereditary, 
and the act of taking orders was as seemly and comely in 
his view of life as the placing of a coping-stone on an 
edifice he had reared from childhood. The sense of a 
call, a message, had ripened faster than his hesitations, 
and he felt no doubt that an institution which gave a 
sincere and earnest man the opportunity of sharing his 
thought once a week with fairly serious and recep- 
tive auditors was a tolerable enough makeshift in a 
world where all instruments were unsatisfactory and 
almost none insupportable. It must be clearly realized 
that in questions of machinery, of the modus operandi 
of society and civilization, Emerson's temper was es- 
sentially conservative; his instinct was to grasp the 
approved tool, the existent mechanism: in a universe 
in which all forms were reduced to a virtual equality 
through previous reduction to virtual nullity before the 
face of an omnipotent spirit, it seemed finical to be nice 
in the comparison of ineffectualities. For Emerson, 



THE CRESCENT MAN 23 

moreover, the field of doubt was an outlying and sub- 
sidiary province in the empire of religion: from the calm 
of his basic certainties, he could view theological dogmas 
and disputes with the detached interest with which a 
capitalist, secure of his millions, might watch the dubi- 
ous investment of a few stray thousands in a backward 
town site or a brittle corporation. The great ameliora- 
tion which, in the time of his own parents, had swiftly 
and noiselessly transformed a Calvinistic into a Uni- 
tarian Boston may have encouraged him to hope for a 
greater plasticity in the new faith than the immediate 
future was to justify, and he may have shrewdly divined 
that Unitarianism was a craft which it was easier to 
steer from within than to tow from without. 

The seriousness of his purpose and the extraordinary 
justice of his self -analysis (a justice equally proof against 
the two opposite seductions of self-praise and self-dis- 
paragement) are clearly shown in the "Journal" for 
April 24, 1824, in a passage in which we avail ourselves 
of Mr. Cabot's judicious abridgment, restoring, how- 
ever, the original punctuation: — 

"I am beginning my professional studies. In a month 
I shall be legally a man, and I deliberately dedicate my 
time, my talents, and my hopes to the church. Man is 
an animal that looks before and after; and I should be 
loth to reflect at a remote period that I took so solemn a 
step in my existence without some careful examination 
of my past and present life. . . . 

"I cannot dissemble that my abilities are below my 
ambition. And I find that I judged by a false criterion 
when I measured my powers by my ability to under- 



24 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

stand and to criticise the intellectual character of an- 
other. . ♦ . I have, or had, a strong imagination, and 
consequently a keen relish for the beauties of poetry. 
. . . My reasoning faculty is proportionably weak: nor 
can I ever hope to write a Butler's Analogy or an * Essay * 
of Hume. Nor is it strange that with this confession I 
should choose theology. For, the highest species of rea- 
soning upon divine subjects is rather the fruit of a sort 
of moral imagination, than of the 'Reasoning Machines,* 
such as Locke and Clarke and David Hume." 

The manhood in this passage is far from merely legaL 
The pages that follow contain much of interest, in 
particular the characteristic lament for the want of 
what he calls bottomy that is, of constitution or native 
self-command. 

It was the defect of physical rather than moral bot- 
tom that constituted the immediate source of anxiety 
to the friends of the newly "approbated" minister. 
Disease and teaching, his two distinctive — one might 
almost say his two favorite — aversions, had reduced 
him by the close of 1826 to a condition which obliged 
him to yield to the insistence of anxious relatives that he 
spend the winter in the South. He embarked in the 
ship Clematis on November 25, and passed the winter 
and early spring in Charleston, South Carolina, and in 
St. Augustine, Florida. A single brief sentence in a 
letter to William condenses vividly enough the whole 
spirit of his sojourn in the historic Spanish town. "I 
stroll on the sea-beach and drive a green orange over 
the sand with a stick." Emerson shows the half-dep- 
recating, half -condescending interest which he was wont 



THE CRESCENT MAN 25 

to concede to the sights of travel, and the sluggishness 
of the old-time city finds a fit counterpart in the inva- 
lid's sauntering quiescence. His letters record richly 
comic facts with a pensive nonchalance. One notes with 
interest that, in these early years and in his invalid's 
detachment, the future champion of John Brown and 
denouncer of Daniel Webster was able to record with- 
out indignation, as a mere freak of psychology, the fact 
that a meeting of the Bible Society and a slave auction 
were conducted within earshot of each other at the 
same date and hour. 

He formed, on this trip, a curious — not to say a 
rococo — friendship with a planter in Tallahassee which 
came back years later to his mind when he was cast- 
ing about for an illustration of the "best society" with 
which to garnish the pages of "Society and Solitude." 
The planter's name was Achille Murat, son of Joachim 
Murat, sometime King of Naples, and between the 
Latin glamour and the Napoleonic halo, the flavor of 
chivalric courtesy and a dozen or so clangorous lines of 
Byron which had left martial reverberations in Emer- 
son's ears, his conquest of the austere young Northerner 
was complete. His atheism or agnosticism seems only 
to have solidified the friendship. "I love and honour 
this intrepid doubter," says the reserved descendant of 
the Puritans. A gentlemanly and thoughtful letter of 
Murat's, reprinted in the "Journals," is very droll in 
its mixture of deftness and crudity in the use of Eng- 
lish, but evinces no intellectual power of a grade in the 
least commensurate with Emerson's. 

He returned to Massachusetts in June, 1827, with 



26 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

some improvement in weight and in spirits, but still 
suffering from a "villain stricture" in the right side 
of the chest. He preached intermittently and dispers- 
edly, took lodgings at Divinity Hall again, nursed him- 
self, indulged himself, derided himself, and showed, in 
some whimsical pages of the "Journals," those deeper 
and richer temperamental markings which so curiously 
streaked and flecked the sobriety of his native consti- 
tution. 

"It is a peculiarity (I find by observation upon others) 
of humour in me, my strong propensity for strolling. I 
deliberately shut up my books in a cloudy July noon, 
put on my old clothes and old hat and slink away to the 
whortleberry bushes and slip with the greatest satisfac- 
tion into a little cowpath where I am sure I can defy 
observation. This point gained, I solace myself for hours 
with picking blueberries and other trash of the woods, 
far from fame, behind the birch-trees. I seldom enjoy 
hours as I do these. I remember them in winter; I ex- 
pect them in spring. I do not know a creature that I 
think has the same humour, or would think it respect- 
able. Yet the friend, the anteros, whom I seek through 
the world, now in cities, now in wilderness, now at sea, 
will know the delight of sauntering with the melancholy 
Jaques." 

We have here, of course, no approach to the frolic 
of Dickens, the swagger of Lamb, or the exuberance of 
Carlyle; but the Addisonian or Goldsmithian savor is 
clearly perceptible; he attains aroma, if not raciness. 
The sauntering itself is highly suggestive; in this lane be- 
tween life and death in which he paced casually at this 



THE CRESCENT MAN 27 

period, he half courts the neighborhood of the next 
world as a dispensation from the responsibilities of this. 
He has the suspicious fortitude of the child who welcomes 
sickness in view of the expected holiday. He escapes 
from the writing-desk, he loiters in the halls, he wooes 
the society of laughers, — a trait almost peculiar to this 
freakish parenthesis in his life. 

There is, however, in the general attitude, a whimsical 
despair which is characteristically and abidingly Emer- 
sonian. His humor consists largely in a comic disclaimer 
of responsibility for his delinquent and incorrigible self. 
He had certain temperamental defects, hesitations, em- 
barrassments, gaucheries, and the gravity of these delin- 
quencies was emphasized by the nearness of brothers 
who abounded in the complementary virtues. He carried 
through life a feeling of forlornness and penury, but 
he also felt entitled to claim for himself the indulgence 
and humorous allowance which humanity concedes to 
the hopeless case. There was a kind of sanative limp- 
ness in his constitution at certain times which permitted 
him to lighten demands and to avert strains which 
proved too great for the trembling nervous equipoise of 
his high-strung younger brothers. He spoke gratefully 
of a certain silliness with which a benign Providence had 
tempered his intellectual frame, and thought his "slug- 
gish" manner, his "embarrassed and ragged," or what 
he even chose to term his "flippant," speech a caput 
mortuum, a ballast, " as things go, a defence. " 

The hazards of life in the Emerson household in the 
first thirty years were magnificent and terrible. To 
speak rather floridly, it was a game for high stakes in 



28 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

which the prize was immortality, and the forfeit imbecil- 
ity or death. The elder brother, by firmness of consti- 
tution and the want perhaps of authentic genius, was 
placed in a measure hors de combat: Edward, Charles, and 
Bulkeley paid the forfeit; Waldo drew the immortality. 
The Emersons, to re-apply a figure in " Society and Soli- 
tude," belonged to that class of metals which require to 
be kept under naphtha because they ignite and con- 
sume in the air even at ordinary temperatures; the naph- 
tha in Waldo's case was the "silliness." 

The value of this half -simple, half -adroit management 
of his capacities, both corporal and mental, was to 
be tragically illustrated in the breakdown of Waldo's 
younger brother, nearest to him in age and in feeling, in 
the middle of 1828. Edward Bliss Emerson was one of 
those marvellous creatures the lustre of whose gifts is 
rivalled by their solidity, who impress the profoiuid in 
the same degree in which they dazzle the superficial. At 
Harvard he had not only distanced all his competitors; 
he had virtually suspended competition. He had the 
gifts which would have won honor in ancient Athens, — 
beauty, eloquence, and social charm, yet he was pos- 
sessed of a noble humility which appraised his brother 
Waldo in these terms: "The real lion of the tribe of 
Judah is at home." His energy was, in his warier 
brother's deprecating phrase, "preternatural," and the 
variety of incidental tasks which he combined with the 
study of law in Daniel Webster's office broke down his 
always uncertain health, and ended in the summer of 
1828 in two brief but crippling paroxysms of insanity. 
The lifting of the mental cloud left his health and energy 



THE CRESCENT MAN 29 

lastingly impaired; a clerkship in a commercial house 
in Porto Rico offered a poor salve to his baffled hopes; 
and an exile, borne, as it would seem, with gentle forti- 
tude, was ended by his death in that island in 1834. 

For the two years between the end of 1826 and the 
beginning of 1829, Emerson's position had been highly 
mortifying. He had virtually loafed away two years at 
precisely that period of life when the charge of inaction 
is most galling to a spirited and sensitive young man. 
He had been the victim — almost the butt — of a debili- 
tating but not prostrating illness which supplied him, 
in relation to his inactivity, with the best of reasons but 
the least forcible of pleas. The beginning of 1829 was 
to be marked by a sudden shift of fortune, and March 
of that year was to find him strengthened in health, the 
holder of an advantageous pastorate, and a lover hap- 
pily betrothed. The circumstances of the latter event 
have a special claim to be set down; the loves of great 
men, like their pleasantries, are dear to the multitude, 
because they remove, for the time being and in sem- 
blance, at least, the barrier of superiority. 

In December, 1827, Emerson, preaching at Concord, 
New Hampshire, first met the young Ellen Tucker, 
daughter of a Boston merchant then dead, and living 
in Concord with her mother and stepfather. Colonel 
W. A. Kent. She was sixteen and very beautiful "by 
universal consent" (as he curiously remarks, as if a refer- 
endum were germane to the case), and the first impres- 
sion was remarkable; but the speedy end of his visit sus- 
pended the growth of the feeling. Unfortunately — or, 
rather, fortunately in this instance — the curative vir- 



so RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

tues of absence, like those of total abstinence in other 
forms, depend for their effect on an unbroken adherence 
to the regimen. A year later, in December, 1828, the 
"presumptuous man" hazarded another visit to the 
"dangerous neighborhood," on a journey undertaken 
for the benefit of Edward's health. Allowing, then, for 
the year's interruption, Emerson's feeling appears to 
have been sudden, swift, an instant response of the im- 
agination rather than the senses to the half-romantic 
appeal of an exquisite physical beauty, a delicious, 
dreamy, half-fabulous exaltation of the spirit. Such 
frames of mind may seem foredoomed to illusion, but 
the glimpses we obtain of the intelligence and character 
of Ellen Louisa Tucker suggest powers not equal, it may 
well be supposed, to her lover's, but capable of remov- 
ing all sharpness from the inequality. She could write 
fairly clear-cut verse at a period when to be a woman 
and a poet was to have a double dispensation from 
exactness. 

She bore with heroic sweetness the pulmonary com- 
plaint which cut short her life, and uttered these firm 
words on her deathbed, "I pray for sincerity, and that I 
may not talk, but may realize what I say," — an echo 
of Emerson, no doubt, but even as an echo significant 
in a girl of twenty. 

The effect of the adventure on Emerson's mind is 
suggestive. He was bewildered, like one who suddenly 
wakes up in the midst of a fairy tale; he was courtly, 
holding his love off at an obsequious distance; and he 
was meek. Or, changing our figures a little, we might 
say that he was as glad and still and surprised as a 



THE CRESCENT MAN SI 

young child on whose shoulder a bright moth or bird 
has unexpectedly alighted. 

The courtship was darkened by an episode of terror 
when^the "beautiful friend" (as Emerson provokingly 
calls her) was prostrated for a time by an aggravation 
of the lung trouble. The improvement that followed was 
rapid, and the marriage was solemnized in September, 
1829. Six months before, Emerson had accepted the 
pastorate of the Second (Unitarian) Church of Boston, 
originally as colleague to the Reverend Henry Ware, 
whose health was giving way, and, later, as sole incum- 
bent, when Mr. Ware, on his return from Europe, de- 
cided to resign his charge and accept a divinity profes- 
sorship at Cambridge. He was happy in both of his new 
relationships, shyly, almost forebodingly, happy. In a 
letter to his aunt he dwells on the strangeness of pros- 
perity, and is half inclined to view it with the distrust 
appropriate to strangers. His optimism was now meet- 
ing the unwonted test of good fortune. The melancholy, 
or rather pensiveness, of the note is singularly expressive 
of the joy which it barely qualifies, and out of the momen- 
tary misgiving emerges the restorative sense of a bound- 
less dependence on God and an "appeal to the sentiment 
of collected anticipation with which I saw the tide turn 
and the winds blow softly from the favoring west." The 
letter is only one of the many examples of his constant 
reference, and constant deference, to the opinions of 
Mary Moody Emerson in this transitional and formative 
period of his life. 

The Second Church of Boston appears to have cor- 
dially appreciated the preaching of Emerson. There is 



32 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

sufficient variety of report to make a precise estimate 
of the degree of his general success in the pulpit a task 
of some little difficulty. With two classes his appeal 
would be certain and decided — the small class of in- 
tellectualists who were alive to thought as such, and 
the larger but not perhaps decisively large class who 
were attracted to a personality of great and unique ele- 
vation. The enthusiasm which he aroused in this lat- 
ter class was sometimes expressed in terms which can 
scarcely be read to-day in a Christian spirit by persons 
of masculine taste. Their adoration was none the less 
an effective support, and the combined weight of these 
two classes makes the hold of Emerson upon a Boston 
congregation perfectly explicable. His reasonings may 
have appeared maidenly to those who had formed their 
taste in pulpit oratory on the severe and geometric elo- 
quence of Channing, and his plainness may have seemed 
austere to ears still vibrating with the silvery and 
rounded cadences of Everett. It must be clearly re- 
membered that at this time Emerson had not broken 
definitely with the literary, any more than with the 
theological, tradition; his style had not yet matured 
either the cardinal attractions or the peculiar difficul- 
ties of his later English. His language at this time pos- 
sessed that wholeness of tissue and evenness of work- 
manship which criticism sought in vain in its later and 
more powerful manifestations. No doubt he had in 
these days the manner which reassures the conserva- 
tive; his nascent originalities, which never posed as 
original, peeped out with a gentleness which the un- 
trained eye might well have mistaken for timidity. 



THE CRESCENT MAN S3 

One can imagine a comment of this kind circulating in 
the receptive feminine section of his sympathetic con- 
gregation: "Oh, he never says anything very surprising, 
you know, but he's very spiritual and very literary and 
very nice,'* 

The relation of the young preacher to Unitarian doc- 
trine may be, in part perceived, in part plausibly con- 
jectured, from various self-unbosomments in the "Jour- 
nals." His position seems to have been double, or, to 
avoid the doubleness inherent in that word, duplex. He 
still held to the traditional Unitarian gospel with its 
cargo of revelation, miracle, and a supernatural (not a 
deified) Christ, and he had framed a gospel of his own 
in which the order of nature and the divine voice in the 
personal heart took the place of the historic teaching. 
At the outset the second of these testimonies was the 
corroboration for the first; as time passed, the first be- 
came the corroboration for the second. The order of 
decay in the old doctrines seems to have had this course: 
they became, first subsidiary, then useless, then false. 
At this time the relation of Emerson to the two wit- 
nesses corresponded very closely to the relation of Uni- 
tarianism in general to the Old and New Testaments: 
both were valid, both were respected, but the second 
practically did the work and received the emoluments. 
The father takes the son into the firm as junior part- 
ner, and his own name is foremost on the stationery 
long after his influence has ceased to dominate the office. 

Given an expanding mind in an inexpansive creed, 
and rupture in the end is inevitable. The only element 
of surprise in the Emerson case is the speed of its ar- 



34 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

rival. A little caution, a little strategy, would have en- 
abled him to satisfy his parish without paralysing him- 
self. Men who are stirred to the quick by affirmation or 
denial will view variations in relative emphasis so wide 
as to have all the practical effects of a blunt "Yes" or 
"No" with an equanimity that nothing can perturb. 
The relation between Emerson and his parish was, in a 
distinct and living sense, a friendship, and neither side 
could be called captious or squeamish. Nevertheless, 
after a little more than three years, in the summer of 
1832, we find Emerson parting from his church on the 
ground of his unwillingness to administer the Lord's 
Supper in the form then prevalent in the Unitarian 
body. After much debate and with great reluctance, 
the church rejected his offer to administer a commemo- 
rative rite from which the use of the elements was to be 
excluded, and, by a vote of thirty to twenty-four, de- 
cided to accept his resignation. On both sides the regret 
was sincere and the behavior admirable. 

One cannot help wishing that the difference had oc- 
curred on a more dramatic issue, or, at least, on an issue 
in which the sacredness, or integrity, of Emerson's per- 
sonality was more manifestly and indisputably at stake. 
It is difficult to withhold a measure of sympathy from 
Charles Emerson's indignant protest that "a torch of 
kindling eloquence has been snuffed out in such an in- 
signfficant fashion." In one sense, it is all in keeping; the 
emphasis on the individual soul is heightened by the 
preference even of its less clear and peremptory voices 
to the conservation of social interests whose value even 
the individualist concedes. Emerson was too clear- 



THE CRESCENT MAN 35 

headed not to have foreseen at the time of his "appro- 
bation" the disparities that were sure to arise between 
the needs of an original mind and the prescripts of an 
institution representing both an older and a more gen- 
eral or vulgar point of view. He must have resolved to 
overlook the less weighty of these disparities, and it sur- 
prises us a little that this resolve was insufficient to 
carry him safely over this ritualistic difficulty. He says 
himself: "I know very well that it is a bad sign in a man 
to be too conscientious and stick at gnats. The most 
desperate scoundrels have been the over-refiners. With- 
out accommodation society is impracticable." An antag- 
onist could not have been more trenchant. (The censor 
of Emerson continually finds himself in the humiliating 
position of owing the best statement of his case to the 
subject of his strictures.) We must remember, however, 
that minds at once liberal and conscientious often sanc- 
tion in a third person a latitude which they could not 
stomach in themselves, and that, in the act of prevision, 
one's future self is virtually a third person. Moreover, 
we cannot choose our scruples in advance, and it is not 
always the largest or most formidable fish-bone that 
lodges in the throat and throws the system into pertur- 
bation in the effort at disgorgement. Emerson's con- 
science, with that unscrupulousness in carrying its point 
which is characteristic of that amiable faculty, no doubt 
insisted on the fact that his material interests were all 
on the side of acquiescence or compromise. We must 
bear in mind, also, that with Emerson the antithesis 
between individual probity and social usefulness could 
never attain the sharpness which it presents to average 




S6 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

men, because with him the social well-being was the 
effect, the metre indeed, of the faithfulness of the sin- 
gle man's adherence to his instincts. To sacrifice the 
unit to the commonalty was not to sacrifice the twig to 
the branch: it was to sacrifice the root to the stem. 

That logic was decisive in the case is the reverse of 
probable. The upshot of the matter was this : Emerson 
felt distress in the carrying-out of the rite, and in time 
that distress became imperative. "This is the end of 
my opposition, that I am not interested in it. I am con- 
tent that it stand to the end of the world, if it please 
men and please Heaven, and I shall rejoice in all the 
good it produces." 

Words of unequalled loftiness and benignity, but 
their withdrawnness, their sequestration, is unequivocal. 
This, clearly, was no man to lead a parish. The favor- 
ableness of the experiment at the Second Church gave 
a peculiar decisiveness to its miscarriage. Fortune, in a 
whim of generosity, had offered the most sensitive mind 
in New England a pulpit in which the pressure of the 
institution on the spirit had been reduced to its practical 
minimum, and that pressure had been found intolerable. 
He had reason for thankfulness that the proof had been 
at once so summary and so absolute. 

The young man was in a sense adrift. The pastorate 
had been relinquished, the maternal household had long 
since broken up, though its debris were partly reassem- 
bled from time to time at various points in the channel 
of the family life, and his own fireside had been dark- 
ened by the death of the young wife, Ellen, in February, 
1831. His grief was sincere and tender, but it took the 



THE CRESCENT MAN 37 

form of a great mournfulness rather than of a poignant 
anguish. Intercourse with Ellen had been rather a ce- 
lestial privilege than an organic or spiritual necessity, 
and even in the "Journal" passage in which, five days 
after her death, "the enchanting friend" is lamented 
in a spirit hovering between Greek and Christian, even 
in the lovely lines in which, two years afterward, her 
memory is recalled in distant Naples, we feel that her 
departure has left the man whole, the seat of being, in- 
violate. A priceless illustration had been torn, as it 
were, from the volume of his life-history, but there was 
no disturbance in \the continuity or the character of 
the text. \ 

His health, never^efinitively established, broke down 
under these accumulating strains: as Mr. Cabot says, 
"The thirtieth year, which proved fatal to Edward, and 
which Charles did not quite reach, was the critical pe- 
riod for him, too." A dream of the South changed in a 
few hours into "a purpureal vision of Naples and Italy" 
to which the sordid but inevitable initial step was the 
embarkation, on Christmas Day, 1832, on the trading- 
brig Jasper, bound for Malta, with a cargo of logwood, 
tobacco, sugar, and other West Indian produce. He 
spent seven months in Europe, reaching Malta on Feb- 
ruary 2, 1833, Paris on June 20, and London on July 
21. Italy meant less to him than perhaps it should have 
meant to the possessor of a receptive eye, a cultivated 
mind, and an imagination not impervious to the exhil- 
arations of romance. Emerson finds much to enjoy, but 
his enjoyment is rather the alleviation than the ground 
and texture of his experience. He is restless, uneasy, for 



38 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

him perhaps a trifle querulous; he is singularly accessible 
to any annoyance, beggars, cheats, ciceroni, mummery, 
which may serve as a pretext for disenchantment. At 
the Capitoline Museum, "it is vain to refuse to admire "; 
he is not sunk to the baseness of an unresisting surren- 
der. "I make a continual effort not to be pleased except 
by that which ought to please me." We are not to sup- 
pose that the young New Englander was a willing ac- 
complice in the pleasures he underwent at the hands 
of those tyrannic and implacable cities, Rome and 
Florence. 

This is, of course, an exaggeration: Emerson was no 
bigoted Puritan, as is clearly proved from his creditably 
unsuccessful attempt to view the Florentine ballet from 
the point of view of the mere artist. But he felt in Italy 
an element that was alien as well as foreign. He reminds 
us of a child taken to a fair villa where his eye is half 
lured, half teased, by a distracting abundance of strange 
and sumptuous objects and drawn back by an irrepres- 
sible longing to the consoling frugalities of his own nur- 
sery. Another point may be urged with some probabil- 
ity. Emerson had no doubt by this time perfected his 
method, or — to speak in the homely terms he loved — 
learned his trade, definable briefly as the extraction of 
the divine meaning from experience. Now the substi- 
tution of one type of experience for another subjected 
him to the same disadvantage which a mechanic would 
feel in the use of novel tools. He could find his insights 
in Italy, just as, if need were, he could read his Bible in 
Tuscan, but the process in both cases was burdensome. 
He says in one place, "An hour in Boston and an hour 



THE CRESCENT MAN 39 

in Naples have about equal value to the same person," 
but he complains in another context that long journeys 
do not "yield a fair share of reasonable hours." There 
was nothing provincial in his attitude. In his disparage- 
ment — or rather in his attenuation — of Italy and 
Europe, he held a brief not for New England but for 
mankind. Capable in his happier moods of vigorous 
response to mild stimuli, he felt more strongly the need 
of evolving the mood than of heightening the stimulus. 
While still at sea, on January 3, he had a "solitary, 
thoughtful hour" at sunrise. 

"The clouds were touched 
And in theii' silent faces might be read 
Unutterable love. . . ." 

"What, they said to me, goest thou so far to seek — 
painted canvas, carved marble, renowned towns? But 
fresh from us, new evermore, is the creative efflux from 
whence these works spring." 

If the journey brought out Emerson's ability to 
dispense with antiquities and celebrities among things, 
it marked, with curious distinctness, his dependence 
upon people. The eulogist of solitude, the upholder of 
the flight "from the alone to the alone," bewails his 
loneliness in parts of Italy with the pathetic sincerity 
of an American banker or merchant whom the rigor of 
fate leaves companionless in a foreign capital. The sight 
of a certain Lewis Stackpole in Rome refreshes him like 
the glimpse of "a young palm tree in the desert." The 
points of eminence in his first European trip were his 
visits to four distinguished men of letters, Landor (at 
his villa in Fiesole), Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. 



40 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Emerson approached the masters gratefully but without 
diffidence, and bore himself in their presence with a 
suavity which never for a moment compromised his 
gentle imperturbable erectness. Yet his bearing in the 
four conversations, piquantly epitomized in "English 
Traits," has observable shades and discriminations. 
With Landor he is the alert and sympathetic spectator 
of a glancing and arrowy intelligence; with Coleridge 
he suggests the demure and correct young divinity 
student which the sage of Highgate not improbably 
thought him to be; with Wordsworth he is almost the 
American schoolboy straightening his face with diffi- 
culty in a situation where the claims of decorum and 
comedy were tryingly equal; with Carlyle he is the rev- 
erent and affectionate partaker in a sacrament of broth- 
erly regard and fellowship. With Emerson the large 
traits are stable and abiding, but the flexibility and ver- 
satility of the minor attributes is great. 

Landor was crisp and pointed, and, twenty-three 
years later, devoted a pungent commentary to the cor- 
rection of the alleged errors in the pubhshed record of 
the interview in "English Traits." Coleridge was self- 
engrossed and homiletic, and the obliging and courteous 
Wordsworth, in his sober outgiving of conservative 
ideas, forgot, or seemed to the keen young American to 
forget, that admirers are sometimes discriminating. 

The real satisfaction came in the visit to Carlyle, still 
comparatively unknown at thirty-eight, at his wife's 
lonely estate at Craigenputtock. No incident in nine- 
teenth-century history is dearer to students of letters 
than the meeting of these two men, the supreme intel- 



THE CRESCENT MAN 41 

lects perhaps of two continents, the one still wrapped 
in obscurity, the other in the clouded dawn of his fame, 
under circumstances which made the encounter an abid- 
ing spring of happy and grateful retrospect to both. 
The hosts, man and wife, abounded in welcome, and the 
short ^visit, comprising but one night's stay, became not 
only the origin but in a sense the pabulum and suste- 
nance of a friendship which ended only with their lives. 
The good genius which brought them together for a day 
benignly parted them upon the morrow; they separated 
before the inevitable dissonances had time to emerge; and 
the trusty Atlantic Ocean mounted guard upon their 
friendship. It may have languished a little in 1848 after 
its imprudent exposure to the hazards of renewed per- 
sonal intercourse during Emerson's second visit to Eu- 
rope, but a return to the old cautious regimen effected 
a speedy cure. The reader watches their friendship with 
a singular trepidation, which rises, at the time of their 
second meeting, into positive alarm, and breathes freely 
only when Emerson is safely reembarked. But it must 
not be supposed that the friendship was illusory because 
it was (or seemed) precarious. Each had sound value 
for the other. Emerson was first drawn to the prophet 
in Carlyle: that interest insensibly ebbed; but the magic 
that had deserted the seer re-attached itseK to the 
demigod; the bringer of light had become the forger of 
thunderbolts. A primeval Titanic force in control of 
the ansemic art of current literature was a fact of inex- 
haustible fascination. The homage of Emerson moved 
Carlyle, not the less possibly for its total disjunction 
from allegiance; and if his younger friend appeared to 



42 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

him in the guise of a pure and noble child, such a min- 
istry — as exemplified in Emerson's little Waldo, for 
instance — holds no unfruitful nor unprivileged place 
among the forms of human service. No misunderstand- 
ing ever blurred their friendship: perhaps their very 
divergence protected them from disagreement. 

In a tedious waiting for good weather at Liverpool, 
Emerson reverted to the thought of his friend: "Ah 
me, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, I would give a gold pound 
for your wise company this gloomy even[ing]." This 
friendly wish did not prevent him from taking at the 
same time and place one of those calm and mild but 
drastic inventories of stock of which a marking down — 
in this case almost genuinely sacrificial — was the fit- 
ting mercantile consequence. I quote with large omis- 
sions : — 

"I thank the great God who has led me through this 
European scene . . . and has now brought me to the 
shore and the ship that steers westward. He has shown 
me the men I wished to see, — Landor, Coleridge, Car- 
lyle, Wordsworth; he has thereby comforted and con- 
firmed me in my convictions. ... I shall judge more 
justly, less timidly, of wise men forevermore. . . . Es- 
pecially are they all deficient, all these four — in dif- 
ferent degrees, but all deficient, — in insight -into reli- 
gious truth." 

There is something very curious and piquant in this 
quiet little assize or Vehmgericht in which a Yankee 
clergyman, unknown to fame and suspected by chari- 
table colleagues of mental alienation, summons to the 
bar the authors of "Characteristics," of "Tintern 



THE CRESCENT MAN 43 

Abbey," and of the "Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale 
of Chamouni," and convicts them of deficiency in 
spiritual insight; and the kernel of the comedy lies in 
the fact that the situation was after all not absurd. The 
quiet yoimg fellow had not overstepped his rights; the 
sentence was sharp, but the court had jurisdiction. 

Room must be spared in the most frugal biography 
for a passage from the "Journal" at sea, conspicuous 
among Emerson's self-disclosures less for its elevation, 
which is more or less the rule in his deliverances, than for 
that permeation of loftiness with humanity which with 
him was the fruit of auspicious moments and fortunate 
combinations: "Milton describes himseK in his letter to 
Diodati as enamored of moral perfection. He did not 
love it more than I. That which I cannot yet declare 
has been my angel from childhood until now. It has 
separated me from men. It has watered my pillow, it 
has driven sleep from my bed. It has tortured me for 
my guilt. It has inspired me with hope. It cannot 
be defeated by my defeats. It cannot be questioned, 
though all the martyrs apostatize." 

There are times when the loftiness of Emerson is, in 
the literal sense, unapproachable, but the above passage 
invites one, as it were, to "moor by his side under the 
lee." 

The positive debt of Emerson to his European sojourn 
was clearly small. It had provided him with one serious 
and enduring friendship, and with many interesting 
hints and particulars. A man who picked up illustra- 
tions everywhere could not traverse Italy, France, and 
Great Britain without enlarging his portfolio. But what 



44 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

he acquired was illustration merely, not principles or 
points of view. Italy could not implant or modify the 
love of beauty in a mind in whom the worship of that 
element was already active and mature. France could 
not undermine a theology which was already in articulo 
mortis y or relax a moral code which had acquired in its 
own school a combination of elasticity and firmness 
quite alien to the self-indulgence of the Seine. At thirty 
years the impetus of his own character was too strong 
to be modified by impacts from without. His real debt 
to Europe was the ascertainment of its inutihty. He 
had received from that benevolent continent a release 
or quittance for all his obligations to itself. It had 
demonstrated in his behalf the indifference of places; it 
had almost convinced him of the equivalency of men. 
He had cleared up his title to the enjoyment of America. 



CHAPTER II 



"full circle" 



Emerson landed in New York, October 9, 1833. For 
almost fifty years, he was now to lead one of the most 
quiet, uniform, and orderly lives recorded in the annals 
of New England. The question of calling was to be 
permanently settled by his self-dedication to lecturing 
and preaching, with the gradual transfer of emphasis to 
the lectures and the slow, almost dilatory, discontinu- 
ance of the sermons. The question of residence, a mat- 
ter of much previous imcertainty with the Emersons, 
was to be set at rest by his removal with his mother in 
1834 to the town of Concord, where the remainder of 
his life was passed. The question of household was to 
be settled within two years by his marriage to Lydia 
Jackson of Plymouth, his lifelong companion and his 
survivor. Even the detail of domicile was to be fixed 
in the same peremptorily final manner by the purchase 
of a house in Concord which was to shelter the family 
until it burned in 1872, and to be rebuilt, with the same 
nicety of conservatism, on the old site and the old 
plan. He was to establish a plain and decorous modus 
Vivendi, the routine of which was to be interrupted only 
by the gradually widening circuits of his lectures which 
were themselves phases in a larger routine. He was to 
form, and cherish inflexibly, a few clearly defined friend- 
ships. He was to have a reputation for assiduity and 



46 EALPH WALDO EMERSON 



^ 



helpfulness with institutions so uncompromisingly re- 
spectable as the town meetiag, the Social Circle, and the 
Saturday Club of Boston. He was to keep his mind and 
his house courteously open to the projectors and vision- 
aries who enhvened, if they did not revivify, the New 
England of his day, but in neither exercise of hospitality 
did the guest become the inmate. He owned land and 
bought land, he owned banking stock and even railway 
stock, lived plainly amid plain men, avoiding all osten- 
tation, even that of simplicity. A conventionalist would 
have hesitated to call his conduct odd, and precisians un- 
derwent the chagrin of finding his morality impeccable. 

Let us examine the facts which contributed to the 
final settlement of Emerson's life, the adoption of the 
lecturer's calling, the marriage with Miss Lydia Jackson, 
and the purchase of the CooHdge house and permanent 
domiciliation in Concord. 

Emerson preached as a rule every Sunday by special 
invitation in various places during the four years that 
followed his return from Europe (1833-37). Not till 
1847 did his preaching finally cease. A call to the pulpit 
at New Bedford was prevented by his stipulation that he 
should be excused from the administration of the Lord's 
Supper, and from the offering of prayer except at his 
own option and initiative. His readiness to discuss the 
proposition is significant, and one notes with interest 
that the second groimd of difference, like the first, 
originates not in a point of doctrine, where disparity 
might have been foretold, but in a point of ritual. The 
reason lies possibly in the fact that dogmas may be 
eluded, but rituals must be faced, that they are parts 



"FULL CIRCLE" 47 

not of the abstraction, belief, but of the reality, experi- 
ence. Emerson's objection to meaningless forms arose 
less from the candor he owed to his people than from 
the seK-impoverishment occasioned by the admission of 
futilities into his own life. 

The decisiveness of Emerson's negative in this and 
the earlier instance is in curious contrast with his gentle 
and affectionate lingering in the purlieus or portico of 
the sacred calling which kept him an unengaged and 
desultory preacher for many years. Resolute as he was 
on cardinal points, there were matters such as church 
attendance, study in college, travel, the use of wine and 
tobacco, the publication of his verse, in which Emerson's 
temperament might be called, not vacillating, in the 
proper sense, but undulatory. He preferred a life broad 
enough to include not only a mansion for the principles 
but a playground for the moods. He knew well at what 
point it became necessary to contract the dimensions 
of the playground. 

The uncertainty of the moment showed itself in the 
abortive project of founding a magazine and in certain 
lectures on natural history, geology, and physics, which 
he speedily gave up ior the literary and philosophical 
themes for which his aptitude was unquestionable. 
This was the starting-point of the practice of lecturing, 
continued into old age, hardly stopped even by the 
decUne of his faculties, passing from Boston where he 
spoke to various societies in the Masonic Temple, in 
Music Hall, in Chickering Hall, in Tremont Temple, in 
Freeman Place Chapel; slowly spreading through New 
England; reaching New York, and moving gradually 



48 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

and tentatively southward, to Philadelphia, to Pitts- 
burg, and, very tardily, to Virginia; following — per- 
haps in its fashion indicating — the march of civiHza- 
tion westward to Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois; 
crossing the Atlantic in 1848 and penetrating the re- 
serves of English aristocracy, hereditary and intellectuaL 
The addresses were single, or arranged in groups of six 
or ten; they averaged perhaps hardly twelve a year, 
though in 1860 twenty-five lectures were deHvered in 
the course of a month. The proceeds were moderate: 
in 1847 he reports five hundred and seventy dollars for 
ten lectures as the maximum of returns; a little later 
nine hundred dollars is mentioned as the probable re- 
compense of a three weeks' tour at fifty dollars a night. 
The occupation was trying. Seen from the trammels 
of the pulpit, the lecture had once put on the illusive 
guise of liberation and opportunity. But freedom has 
its rigors, and there was a real anomaly in the adoption 
of a pubhc career by the most withdrawn and secluded 
spirit in America. "I Hve," he says, "in a balcony or on 
the street." The danger of "charlatanism" confronted 
him in^the very occupation that had attracted him by its 
sincerity. Emerson, except on the occasion of his son's 
death, always outsoars his temporary hardships, but 
one shivers inwardly at the thought of the exposure of 
that sensitive and refined spirit to the inclemencies of 
the lyceum platform. He needed the protective sheath 
of a supporting tradition, an elevated post, a prepared 
courtesy, and established confidence. The bareness of 
the platform was merely a translation to the eye of 
the moral penury of its historical and associative back- 



"FULL CIRCLE" 49 

ground, and the dependence of speaker and audience 
on each other was brought out with hard incisiveness 
and cruel relief by their common independence of ex- 
ternal aids. Emerson's preparation was commonly in 
arrear, his papers were subject to derangement, and he 
was human enough to be capable, in his later years at 
least, of being made "miserable" by an infelicitous ap- 
pearance. The temper of the audience was as incalcula- 
ble as its size, and a sense of immolation accompanies 
the picture one forms of the presentation to the Middle 
West of 1850 of discourses whose very richness must 
have made them cheap. Travel brought its welcome 
stimulus, but it brought also hardships and indignities, 
some of which he describes with a surprising comic gusto 
that would be very diverting if it were not rather sad. 

The preparation for these discourses was also a servi- 
tude. Emerson had the impatience of routine which 
belongs to all minds capable of great exaltations and 
depressions, and dependent for their beatitudes on the 
outcome of delicate and unforeseen combinations. To 
ask him for system was to ask a hunter to follow the 
turnpike. The ranging mind which made him a second- 
rate college student, a reluctant or hesitant writer of 
books, — "the cardinal fault," as he too harshly calls 
it, "of, intellectual dissipation," — made the digestion of 
a lecture out of the" Journals" a burden and an anxiety. 
The contrast between the fickleness of moods and the 
fixity of engagements extorts an outcry now and then 
even from his stoic patience: between lectures the clock 
always ticks too fast. 

The specification of these frictions was peremptory, but 



50 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

the effect must be tempered by the reflection that they 
were the price which Emerson paid for the satisfaction 
of a great moral need — the need of self-mibosomment. 
The pursuit of a calling for forty consecutive years on 
the part of a man for whom the correspondence be- 
tween feeling and deed is the first law of conduct is a 
quite sufficing answer to the supposition of unfitness. 
The lecture system solved a problem, though the device 
was awkward and costly. Even the irksome and morti- 
fying travel had its recompense: he speaks gratefully of 
"the good he finds in the correction which every journey 
makes to my exaggeration, in the plain facts I get, and 
in the rich amends I draw for many listless days in the 
dear society of here and there a great heart." 

The second decisive step of these quietly fruitful 
years was his marriage, on September 14, 1835, to Miss 
Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, sister of the distinguished 
scientist. Dr. Charles T. Jackson. The first name was 
changed from "Lydia" to "Lidian," at Emerson's ^^e- 
quest, to avoid the hiatus between "Lydia" and the 
new surname, a fact worth noting in a man whose want 
of ear has furnished occupation to so many critics. The 
tread of this lady through the unfrequented paths of 
Emerson's domestic life is so noiseless that only a rare 
footfall here and there reaches the ear of the questioi^ 
ing biographer. 

The friends of Mrs. Emerson likened her to an abbess, 
and the face reproduced for us in the "Journals," calm, 
steadfast, melancholy, with still veiled eyes, would have 
blended fittingly enough with the twilight of cloisters 
and the vistas of columnar arcades. Emerson called her 



"FULL CIRCLE" 51 

"Asia" in half -playful, half -devout remirdscence of that 
ancient fount of rituals and faiths from which his wife 
had drawn both the name "Lydia*' and the religious en- 
thusiasm which reproved, as he thought, his own back- 
slidings. Even the childish "Queenie," another home 
name, seems a playful obeisance. Mrs. Emerson, how- 
ever, seems to have readily adjusted herself to her hus- 
band's i>eculiarities. One is glad to jQnd her credited with 
the immortal epigram: "On Sundays it seems wicked to 
go to church." A casual speech or two attest her posses- 
sion of that kindling wit that seemed to cling to the very 
beams and rafters of the Emerson dwelling. (No wonder, 
amid such sparks, that the house burned down; the mar- 
vel lies in its procrastination.) She remarked that the 
giving of an unaccustomed order in the kitchen made her 
feel like the boy who throws a stone and runs. Emer- 
son quotes her less often than Elizabeth Hoar, and, of 
course, far less often than the oracular Aunt Mary, but 
he quotes her with honor, nevertheless. Amid the 
clamor stirred up by the Divinity School Address, she 
urged an heroic quiescence. When a friend said, "The 
end is not yet: wait till it is done"; she replied, "It 
is done in Eternity." Emerson is rhapsodic over this 
speech, but the reader hesitates; it is the touch too 
much, more suggestive of precocity than ripeness. She 
bore herself with admirable generosity in one of the 
shrewdest tests of a wife's forbearance, the husband's 
wish to reverse common usage in the treatment of the 
domestics in the kitchen. She trained the children to 
attend church, while the father, it would seem, looked 
on in the favorite masculine role of disinterested spec- 



52 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

tator : he is said, later, to have thanked his wife for her 
care. There seems to have been an occasional inter- 
change of parts. Dr. Emerson records that when, on a 
rainy Sunday, the mother had allowed the children to 
play battledore and shuttlecock, the game was promptly 
stopped by the displeased father. 

These hints suggest that fortunate plasticity, or wav- 
ering ascendency, known to the best American house- 
holds, where any strong preference on either side is apt 
to carry its point without either the exertion of combat 
or the humiliation of victory. Emerson, who could put 
the breadth of the ecliptic between himself and his 
nearest associates when he chose, was able, after twenty- 
four years of married life, to speak of his "Benvenuta" 
with almost the rich and stately homage with which a 
poet of Dante's time would have exalted the virtues of 
his lady. One feels in Mrs. Emerson the combination of 
an active force which could evoke for her husband all the 
conditions of a care-free and fruitful silence with a "wise 
passiveness" capable of merging itself, when need was, 
in the very silence it had wrought. She satisfied two 
main needs of Emerson in his house-partner, tranquil- 
lity and steadfastness. 

While thus occupied in finding a vocation and in 
choosing a wife, he proceeded to give a third hostage to 
conservatism in the purchase of a house and estate in 
the town of Concord, seventeen miles from Boston, a 
gentle rural commune, nestling placidly in the lap of 
quiet fields and historic memories. 

This little place whose glory, already endorsed by 



"FULL CIRCLE" 53 

history, was now to be countersigned by literature, was 
almost as deeply involved in the traditions of the Emer- 
son family as in the annals of the nation. Peter Bulkeley, 
that admirable combatant and gallant fugitive from 
Archbishop Laud, had founded the town in September, 
1635, and crowned his years of faithful service as first 
pastor of the little church by transmitting to his grand- 
daughter the virtues which her marriage into the Emer- 
son blood was to reenforce and in the lapse of time to 
immortalize. The national and family traditions had 
flowed together in 1775, when the fiery young minister, 
William Emerson, grandfather of Ralph Waldo, was 
barely restrained by his parishioners from active partici- 
pation in the famous skirmish which his spirit animated 
and sustained. His infant daughter, Mary Moody 
Emerson, was in arms, as she liked to say, at the Con- 
cord Fight. On the premature death of the young 
clergyman, his widow (born Phebe Bliss), his pastorate, 
and the Old Manse which he had built passed into the 
hands of the Reverend Ezra Ripley, the step-grand- 
father of the young Emersons, — a man whose character, 
curiously compounded, as Dr. Garnett says, of credulity 
and sagacity, was to stamp itself with ineffaceable dis- 
tinctness on the half -admiring, half -quizzical, and wholly 
affectionate scrutiny of his grandson. In the early 
straitened days, the Old Manse had been an unfailing 
abutment and stay to the precarious Emerson house- 
hold; its hospitalities had blended themselves in boyish 
memories with the peace and rural charm of Concord; 
and in 1834 Emerson and his mother had gone to the 
Old Manse, at Dr. Ripley's invitation, to remain until 



54 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

his marriage with Miss Jackson in the fall of the next 
year made a permanent domicile advisable. 

The "Journals" for August, 1835, contain the fol- 
lowing entry, briefly phrased, as was Emerson's wont 
in handling those chimeras vulgarly known as facts: 
"I bought my house and two acres six rods of land of 
John T. Coolidge for 3500 dollars." The estate was on 
the outskirts of the village and bordered the " Cambridge 
Turnpike" just where it leaves the "Great Road," on 
which the stages passed to and from Boston. The land 
was low, though sand and sun gave defensive compen- 
sations, and Emerson dispassionately calls it "a mean 
place," agreeable only in the forecast of added trees and 
flowers. , While he shared in his remote way the Anglo- 
Saxon feeling that a man like an oak is safe and sound 
in the proportion of his commixture with the soil, he had 
likewise an instinct for the accessible and the proximate 
which helped him to decide in business matters rapidly 
and finally, to minimize drawbacks, and to make the 
best of his decisions. 

The land in the rear of the house sloped gently to one 
of those Concord meadows which Hawthorne classed 
with others of their kind as constituting some of "the 
most satisfying objects in natural scenery." 

A brook divided the meadow; to the south lay the 
cherished woods enclosing the delicate sheet of water 
which has dignified the name "pond" for all Americans; 
and to the north the peaks of Wachusett and Monad- 
nock arose as noble terminals of the fair demesne of 
which his eyes held the suzerainty. His proprietorship 
in a grove of white pines on the near shore of Walden 



"FULL CIRCLE" 55 

and in "a large tract on the farther shore running up 
to a rocky pinnacle " was attested by evidence less sub- 
ject to legal cavil. 

The house itself was an unpretending, substantial, 
commodious mansion, quite free from what might be 
called the rhetoric of architecture, with no diffidence 
as to its predilection for right angles, meeting all practi- 
cal needs with the efficient but not obsequious thorough- 
ness of a New England housekeeper. The tulips and 
roses which Mrs. Emerson had brought from Plymouth 
took kindly to their new setting in the small garden by 
the brookside toward the south, and the philosopher's 
apple, pear, and plum trees grew with a willingness that 
bespoke the occasional resort to foreign aid. The whole 
situation, house, and mode of life suggested that half- 
way point between the austere and the mellow — like 
the apple in its equal remoteness from the lemon 
and the pear — which seems proper and congenial to 
Emerson. 

One is half convinced that intellect is a thing apart 
from character when one sees how little the mighty 
intellectual advance of Emerson affected the primor- 
dial, temperamental New Englander reasserting himself 
in this domestication in Concord. The moral pioneer 
chooses a home in a town whose life was a rich loam of 
ancestral and national reminiscence; he marries a woman 
from Plymouth of all towns, he who disowned the super- 
lative; he lives on terms of semi-ffiial intimacy with a 
Puritan of the old type, and enters into relations of def- 
erential rather than condescending comradeship with 
plain country neighbors untainted with new ideas. 



56 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

The hot radical may be indignant at this spectacle 
of the advanced thinker marrying in the most abjectly 
respectable fashion, rearing his children with the most 
pusillanimous correctness, and reaping the just penalty 
of his cowardice in seeing them grow up incorrigibly 
virtuous. But the paradox is no enigma. Men over- 
leap or overturn the social order primarily because the 
social order as it stands denies them certain things — 
property or privilege or women — which they think 
needful to their happiness or the pursuit of their chosen 
ends. What they hate is not so much the evil as the 
impediment. Emerson felt no real impediment in the 
status quo : his ends could be pursued even within the 
frame of the unjust and illogical establishment. He ac- 
cepted the tenure of property and the political order of 
his time, just as he might take the coach in Concord or 
the tramway in State Street without the slightest blind- 
ness to their inconveniences, but with a decent thank- 
fulness to the stupid contrivance which helped him in 
its rude fashion to do his errand, — that is, to reach his 
audience and to say his word. In that word lay his 
subsidy to progress. 

Emerson's secret, moreover, lay not in the discovery 
of new springs of value, but in the extraction of new 
values from old sources; his Arno was the ''second'^ 
Musketaquid; his London or Paris was the Concord 
under Concord. A man whose purpose is to view each 
successive object as a receptacle and organ of infinity 
will find his advantage in placing himself in the neigh- 
borhood of relatively simple things and persons; the 
simplest objects are most susceptible of this dilation. 



"FULL CIRCLE" 57 

One can imagine a lyre or a vase expanded to the di- 
mensions of the empyrean, but the experiment would 
be almost grotesque if repeated on a piano or a watch. 

The Nemesis which overhung the Emerson family, 
and which had already claimed the lives of three chil- 
dren in infancy and the sanity of one son, was closing 
in these years aroimd Edward and Charles. Edward died 
at Porto Rico, October 1, 1834; Charles at New York, 
May 9, 1836. Of Edward Emerson, no clear image is 
to be obtained; outline is lost in lustre. Of Charles 
Chauncy Emerson a clearer idea is derivable from a 
slightly greater bulk of data. In him the loftiness and 
magnanimity of which the supply in the Emerson house- 
hold was unstinted appears to have been qualified and 
vivified by a mettlesome wiKulness and impatience, a 
touch of not ignoble arrogance. He added to these traits 
a youthful affluence of censure, capable of flicking even 
his brother Waldo, — always, be it remembered, in the 
high-minded fashion proper to the clan, — and a vari- 
able temperament to which despondency found easy ac- 
cess. The reports or extracts in the "Journals" show 
a wit and a command of simile commensurate with that 
of Waldo himself, but the latter insists on the poverty 
of Charles's written composition in comparison with his 
oratorical force. Had he and Waldo written a book in 
common, the separation of the parts assignable to each 
would have tasked the alertest criticism. 

It is a curious circumstance that the fact of a man's 
intimate association with two persons endowed with su- 
perlative qualities of mind and heart seems to lose half 
its interest and worth when the hearer learns that the 



58 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

two persons are his brothers. To live with rare persons 
remains none the less a privilege, and the modification 
of Emerson's life by such intercourse was, in all proba- 
bility, great. He had formed ideals of the confluence 
of souls which the society of his brothers naturally 
failed to satisfy. But he combined in notable fashion 
the exigency of the insatiable idealist with an almost 
grandmotherly faculty of educing contentment out of 
everyday possibilities, and he had husbandry enough 
to extract profit from the very sources of his disap- 
pointment. His intercourse with his brothers had been 
broken and uncertain since he had entered Harvard, 
and, even in the periods of reunion, he was no doubt 
slack, like the rest of mankind, in availing himself of 
the always ready and never urgent opportunity. The 
regret for the partial use of irrecoverable occasions 
may have intensified the bitterness with which he be- 
wails his own destitution in the final passage of the 
shining Dioscuri from his life. 

"And so, Lidian," he writes of Charles, "I can never 
bring you back my noble friend who was my ornament, 
my wisdom and my pride. A soul is gone, so costly and so 
rare that few persons were capable of knowing its price, 
and I shall have my sorrow to myself, for if I speak of him 
I shall be thought a fond exaggerator. He had the four- 
fold perfection of good sense, of genius, of grace, and of 
virtue as I have never seen them combined. I deter- 
mined to live in Concord, as you know, because he was 
there; and now that the immense promise of his maturity 
is destroyed, I feel not only unfastened there and adrift, 
but a sort of shame at living at all. I am thankful, dear 



"FULL CIRCLE" 59 

Lidian, that you have seen and known him to that de- 
gree you have. I should not have known how to for- 
give you an ignorance of him, had he been out of your 
sight. Thanks, thanks, for your kindest sympathy and 
appreciation of him. And you must be content hence- 
forth with only a piece of your husband; for the best of 
his strength lay in the soul with which he must no more 
on earth take counsel. How much I saw through his 
eyes! I feel as if my own were very dim. — Yours affec- 
tionately, Waldo E." 

Several points in this citation merit notice. There 
is the cry of dependence from the great champion and 
example of self-reliance. There is the studious and dig- 
nified elegance of style, which was the form Emerson's 
sincerity took on occasions on which, with the majority 
of men, the measure of sincerity is plainness. There is 
the innocent and affectionate relegation of the wife to a 
quite secondary place among the promoters of his well- 
being. There is the pleasing counter-evidence that the 
best and inmost in his character was not withheld from 
her sympathy. There is the emphasis — to be clearly 
marked but not vulgarly misinterpreted — on the 
devastation and dismemberment of his own life rather 
than on the relation of the fact to Charles (should he 
pity the invulnerable?). It should likewise be remarked 
that his sorrow experienced the difficulty — common to 
all human passions — of living up to its own prospec- 
tus. On May 16, he writes in the "Journal": "Now 
commences a new and gloomy epoch of life." But the 
"Journal" is not slow to resume its habitual grave 
cheerfulness; on May 19, ten days after the event, he is 



60 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

regaining steadiness. By June 16 the sorrow already is 
resolving itself into the calm of spiritual philosophy. He 
tells us that when a friend has become to us an "object 
of thought" and "a new measure of excellence,** when 
he has bred "a confidence in the resources of God by 
exceeding and expanding our previous ideal, it is already 
a sign to you that his oflfice is closing: expect hencefor- 
ward the hour in which he shall be withdrawn from your 
sight." The cool, speculative detachment of this un- 
clouded, though at times rather misty, utterance must 
be counterpoised with the cry of bereavement in the 
letter to the wife before the compass and variety of the 
real Emerson can be adequately gauged. 

The year 1836 and the month September saw the 
publication of Emerson's first work, "Nature," an anony- 
mous essay covering ninety-five pages in the original 
edition. The sale was so dilatory that it is said that, at 
the end of ten years, the edition of five hundred copies 
was unexhausted. The failure of the first great work of 
an original mind is so much a matter of course that the 
search for reasons is almost supererogatory. Complete- 
ness, however, requires us to note that the reserved and 
abstract title, "Nature,** was, in a very literal sense, 
unpromising; that the anonymity placed the essay in 
the same hapless category with the "hope of orphans 
and unfathered fruit"; that there was nothing in its 
bulk to suggest or advertise its real weight; that the 
novelty of particular views, which might in another 
form have proved exciting, was a good deal tempered 
by the strangeness and f oreignness of the whole (a stone 
that would be conspicuous on the roadside is unre- 



"FULL CIRCLE" 61 

marked in a museum); and that the style offered real 
diflSculties to the unprepared and unconvinced beginner. 
Mr. Cabot speaks, on Mr. Frothingham's authority, 
of violent attacks from quarters presumably orthodox, 
and goes on to say that the "Christian Examiner,'* 
the spokesman for the Unitarian body, treated the work 
"rather indulgently, as a poetical rhapsody, containing 
much beautiful writing and not devoid of sound philoso- 
phy, but, on the whole, producing the impression of a 
disordered dream." Carlyle wrote: "Your little azure- 
colored Nature gave me true satisfaction.** John Ster- 
ling wrote: "I have read very, very little modern Eng- 
lish writing that has struck and pleased me so much.*' 
These plaudits were doubtless consolatory; in both 
countries, however, Emerson ran^no risk of that degree 
of pecuniary or popular success which would have prej- 
udiced his claim to the title of philosopher. 

The effectual retort to indifference is indifference, and 
Emerson's defences, in this kind, were impregnable. 
He would have valued influence, but hardly popularity, 
and his mind, in 1836, had much to engage it, beyond 
the reception granted to his first book. In May, Charles 
had died; in October, his life was brightened by the 
birth of his first child, Waldo. Emerson's attitude to- 
ward the little boy, whose advent appears to have re- 
vived his waning faith in miracle, is very characteristic, 
very pleasing, and very odd. It seems a combination 
of the shy, gingerly, admiring awe with which the child 
of three or four surveys its new-born brother, and the 
piety of some faithful henchman to whom the charge 
of infant royalty has been unexpectedly assigned. In 




62 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

the "Journal" note for October 31, when the child is 
less than a day old, he is already turning his happiness 
into pabulum for his philosophy, but backsliding from 
high philosophy into simple happiness with a winningly 
human frailty. 

"Last night, at 11 o'clock, a son was born to me. 
Blessed child ! A lovely wonder to me, and which makes 
the universe look friendly to me. How remote from my 
knowledge, how alien, yet how kind, does it make the 
Cause of Causes appear! The stimulated curiosity of 
the father sees the graces and instincts which exist in- 
deed in every babe, but unnoticed in others; the right 
to see all, know all, to examine nearly, distinguishes the 
relation, and endears this sweet child." The analyst 
struggles bravely for the mastery of the field, but at last 
capitulates to the parent in the use of the ensnaring 
adjective "cunning." Fatherhood unsettles the equi- 
poise of the steadiest philosophy. 

The naivete with which the two philosophers or the 
two infants — either term seems incidentally applicable 
— began the study of each other is a spectacle of charm- 
ing raciness — of a charm, indeed, of which raciness was 
only part. The boy was worthy to serve as a new 
spring of insight to the father, but it is doubtful if his 
baby Messiahship were worth so much to Emerson as 
the occasion he gave for the inflow and exercise of the 
simple human instincts. It is no mere intelligence or in- 
tuition that moans in the "Threnody," and, the higher 
and more ethereal a philosophy becomes, the less it can 
dispense with the checks and clews that are furnished 
by the ordinary sympathies. 



"FULL CIRCLE" 63 

Transcendentalism — a term which seems the in- 
stinctive effort of the shrewd public to balance the airi- 
ness of a philosophy by the solidity of its name — was 
a word that came to be applied, in the late thirties in 
New England, to the group of thinkers of whom Emer- 
son was the inspiration if not the chief. The philosophic 
system to which the New England movement loosely 
attached itself by the long tether of this formidable 
word was the creation of Immanuel Kant and his fol- 
lowers and modifiers in Germany. The direct influence 
of the German thinkers on New England was confined 
to the few scholars conversant with their tongue, and to 
the readers of the sparing and miscellaneous translations 
undertaken in 1838 by George Ripley and his co-workers. 
The main sources of information were the French com- 
mentators and imitators, De Stael, Cousin, and Jouf- 
f roy, and the two commanding and hieratic Englishmen, 
Coleridge and Carlyle. The looseness and vagueness of 
the form imder which the system entered America no 
doubt contributed to its plasticity and hence to its use- 
fulness in this country. What the Americans wanted 
was not so much an itinerary as a passport. They asked 
from the Germans what their Puritan ancestors had 
asked from James I — a charter. The less they knew 
of the details of the patent, the more free they felt to 
pursue their own objects in their own way. 

In Germany, in France, and largely in England, these 
philosophic dogmas had been the intellectual sustenance 
of the cultivated few. In America they had the singular 
and surprising fortune to encounter what is almost as 
rare as speculative originality itself — a current of active 



64 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

religious life. A pliilosopliy intersected a religion, and 
the philosophy, while it suffered a disintegration of its 
coherence and soHdity, underwent likewise a vitalization 
which optimism itself could hardly have reckoned among 
the largesses of possibiHty. The effect of Christianity 
on Platonism may have been not wholly dissimilar. 

The philosophy of Kant was a rebuttal of the doc- 
trine of the seventeenth-century English empiricist, 
John Locke, that the mind is a tabula rasa, without 
independent knowledge, that its contents are importa- 
tions from the external world by the highway of experi- 
ence. Kant's main affirmations were three: that the 
mind possessed in its own right certain ideas or catego- 
ries, such as space, time, quantity, and relation, which 
supply one factor to knowledge; that while an external 
reality exists, that reality including its highest notion, 
God, is inaccessible to cognition; that the voice in man's 
soul, the categorical imperative, is the mouth-piece of 
the spiritual order. These doctrines were developed 
and variously modified by Jacobi, Fichte, Schelling, and 
Hegel. 

The value of German theory to the New England 
thinkers lay mainly in the authorization it gave to the 
common tenure of two cherished and indispensable 
opinions, the presence of God as a voice in the individual 
heart and his existence, likewise, as an external sub- 
stantive reality. 

Unitarianism, in the gentle and gradual conquest 
which it made of Boston in the late-eighteenth and early- 
nineteenth centuries, had spared the dignity and office 
of Jesus to the utmost point compatible with the reso- 



"FULL CIRCLE" 65 

lute putting-by of the Trinitarian dogma. It had left 
Christ less than God yet more than man, suspended, as 
it were, between earth and heaven, a position, obviously, 
of unstable equilibrium. For deity as for kingship, there 
are no permanent half -descents; the impulse to com- 
plete the work is irresistible. The Unitarians taught that 
Christ was the mediator between man and God, and 
that his removal would leave man without access to 
divinity. But another point of view was clearly possible. 
If Christ stood between man and God, would not the 
removal of that intermediary leave God and man face 
to face? The suggestion was revolutionary. Immediate 
access to the truth annulled the necessity of revelation; 
immediate access to the power abolished the office of a 
mediating Christ. "The transference of supernatural 
attributes to the natural constitution of mankind," as 
O. B. Frothingham has clearly defined it, was, in the 
aspect it presented to the eyes of New England Uni- 
tarians, the most brilliant, the most sensational coup de 
main, which the history of philosophy reports. A pre- 
rogative so extraordinary that its operation had been 
hitherto confined to an individual and raised to super- 
natural dignity, was made at a stroke the property of 
the whole race and reduced to the same plane of natural- 
ness with hearing and digestion. 

A question remained as to the faculty by which man 
was to appropriate these high truths. A new, a particu- 
lar, faculty was felt to be all but indispensable. The 
understanding was a factotum, a man-of -all- work: 
moreover, its fallibility was conceded; its errors had 
wasted the oil of scribes and multiplied the shelves of 



66 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



^1 



libraries. When a man, a nobleman, for instance, for- 
sakes the common sanctuary and establishes worship in 
his own house, his first step is to appropriate a distinct 
room to that worship, and to segregate that room from 
the rest of the edifice. Similarly, when a man's religion 
becomes internal and private, his first impulse is to rail 
off a section or compartment of the mind to be reserved 
rigorously for the sacred purpose. Revelation was no 
longer documentary but psychological; nevertheless the 
old excluding and specializing instinct held its ground; 
a dedicated and exclusive faculty took the place of a 
dedicated and exclusive record. Nothing can be more 
curious than to find the infallibility once ascribed to the 
record reappearing, with scarcely abated precision and 
certainty, in the Emersonian tenet of the inerrancy and 
finality of the dictates of the "Reason." This "Reason," 
which is traceable to Kant, but which other men had 
cherished and propagated, became the stronghold and 
watchtower of the Transcendentalists. 

In 1836 and later, a club of perhaps a dozen thought- 
ful persons, men and women, formed the habit of meet- 
ing at each other's houses for the informal discussion of 
such topics as mysticism, pantheism, personality. No- 
body knew who first dubbed them the "Transcendental 
Club": the culprit observed a prudent anonymity. 
They included distinguished or eminent names: George 
Ripley, F. H. Hedge, Convers Francis, O. A. Brownson, 
C. A. Bartol, James Freeman Clarke, J. S. D wight, 
W. H. Channing, Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, 
Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, R. W. Emerson. 
Their common creed included little else but concentra- 



"FULL CIRCLE" 67 

tion in each man of the prerogatives formerly divided 
between Christ and the Bible; a joke which custom has 
effectually staled declared they called themselves the 
like-minded because no two of them thought alike. 
Their informality disdained a president; their organiza- 
tion indeed was the filmiest thread on which a set of 
meetings could be beaded. The whole movement of 
which this club was a part has a curious, hand-to-mouth, 
drifting inconsecutiveness. Even taking into account 
its two concrete manifestations, the "Dial" and Brook 
Farm, its history, which has a trick of evading its his- 
torian, seems a patch rather than a stripe on the sober 
surface of New England life. 

Emerson's participation in this club as one seeker 
among a dozen others is pleasantly illustrative of a 
temper to whom contact with men was necessary in the 
same degree in which commixture was impossible. His 
relation to these scholars and thinkers was that of a 
soldier who speaks only brokenly the language of his 
associates in the ranks or the trenches: the barrier to 
companionableness need not hinder the comradeship 
from being perfect. He was co-worker with his fellow- 
men in the first of undertakings, the betterment of hu- 
manity through the individual, and he had so little of 
those^twin vices, the pride of insulation and the pride of 
leadership, that he assumed gladly the posts of comrade 
and subaltern. He had his impediments which were 
likewise his defences; he' carried about with him a moat 
which served both as irksome barrier and useful pro- 
tection. 

One other feature of the Transcendental movement 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



i 



must be glanced at in this place. That movement was, 
in essence, a disclosure of possibilities; it showed vistas 
within man. Now the neighborhood of exalted possi- 
bilities, whether industrial or literary or religious, has 
always proved intoxicating to weak minds. Tran- 
scendentalism became for the credulous and the restless 
a spiritual goldfield which transformed New England for 
the time being into an immaterial California or Klon- 
dike, and, in the ideal as in the commercial Eldorado, 
the price, both in time and toil, of the utilization of 
opportunity was greatly underestimated. The oppor- 
tunity itself in the New England case was rated too 
high. The newly disclosed possibilities were not them- 
selves new; nothing, in fact, was new but the perception, 
and the effect of the perception in advancing the possi- 
bilities was easily overrated by the sanguine enthusiast. 
By a curious anomaly, faith in a quasi-miraculous inter- 
vention reappeared in the weaker disciples of a cult 
which had prided itself on the elimination of miracle; 
a slight change of attitude, a variation in method, was to 
effect the transformation of society by a spiritual leger- 
demain. The social direction which these aspirations 
often took was promoted by the interest with which 
New England followed the theories and experiments of 
French socialists, of whom Albert Brisbane, the disciple 
of Fourier, was at this period a prominent spokesman. 
Lowell's picture of these vagaries at the beginning of 
the essay on Thoreau has undergone and survived the 
ordeal of frequent quotation: — 

"Ecce nunc tempus acceptabile ! was shouted on all 
hands with every variety of emphasis, and by voices of 



"FULL CIRCLE" 69 

every conceivable pitch, representing the three sexes 
of men, women, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagus. 
. . . Redeunt Saturnia regna, — so far was certain, 
though in what shape, or by what methods, was still a 
matter of debate. Every possible form of intellectual 
and physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. Bran 
had its prophets, and the presartorial simplicity of 
Adam its martyrs, tailored impromptu from the tar- 
pot by incensed neighbors, and sent forth to illustrate 
the 'feathered Mercury' as defined by Webster and 
Worcester. Plainness of speech was carried to a pitch 
that would have taken away the breath of George Fox; 
and even swearing had its evangelists, who answered 
a simple inquiry after their health with an elaborate 
ingenuity of imprecation that might have been honorably 
mentioned by Marlborough in general orders. Every- 
body had a mission (with a capital M) to attend to 
everybody-else's business. . . . Not a few impecunious 
zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by 
other people), professing to live on the internal revenues 
of the spirit. Some had an assurance of instant mil- 
lennium so soon as hooks and eyes should be substituted 
for buttons. Communities were established where 
everything was to be common but common-sense." 

The light-headedness of a community in many ways 
so cool-headed and so long-headed as New England is 
in itself a phenomenon worthy of study. It offers a clear 
demonstration of the danger of revoking the outward 
law, the law of custom or social expectation, without 
handing over the policing of the vacated district to the 
charge of an inner magistracy of equal authority and 



70 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

force. The Philistine sense of the danger of too much 
religion — to Philistines — has its quantum of sagacity. 
It may be doubted, however, whether the diagnosis in 
these morbid cases should read, religious excess, or 
religious insufl&ciency. As knowledge is the best exor- 
cism for the demon of knowingness, so religion, as the 
example of Emerson clearly proves, is the effective cure 
for religiosity. Emerson, indeed, sitting sane and quiet 
amid the headiness and giddiness which his own and 
kindred ideas had induced in a susceptible community, 
reminds one a little of the picture of Socrates in the 
*' Symposium," drinking freely and with perfect im- 
pimity of the wine which had reduced his companions 
to imbecility or stupor. 

Emerson kept his head, because experience had disci- 
phned him in the slow growth and high cost of spiritual 
amelioration. He was too good "a man of business*' in 
the religious field to be misled by the prismatic dreams 
and glittering promises of the get-rich-quick syndicates. 
The secret of Emerson was tillage. His gains were the 
fruits of industry and watchfulness, of patience and 
abstinence, of the steady pursuit of a high object dating 
back to his earliest years and to years long antecedent 
to his birth. He knew the costliness of that apparently 
cheap and readily improvisable commodity, — a state 
of mind. He was so sure of his own ground that he could 
safely dispense even with that attitude of scorn and 
contempt which is one means by which self-distrustful 
men entrench themselves against the assaults of the 
enemy. The practice of charity toward mania was a 
virtue to which he was constitutionally disposed and 



"FULL CIRCLE" 71 

which the conduct of his visitors maintained in a course 
of healthy exercise. Illustrations of this polite wariness 
which took each man's censure, but reserved its judg- 
ment, may be fitly postponed to the periods of the Fruit- 
lands and Brook Farm experiments. Meantime we must 
advert to the biographical aspects of two notable ad- 
dresses, reserving criticism for a later chapter. 

The oration on the "American Scholar" was delivered 
before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge on 
the 31st of August, 1837. It voiced the new gospel which 
the public called "Transcendental," and contained, in 
epitome, the bulk of Emerson's philosophy. The re- 
ception of the "intellectual Declaration of Independ- 
ence," as Holmes called it, was cordial. Lowell hints 
at a slight divergence of opinion in a passage which as 
a whole confirms the impression of enthusiasm. He 
dwells on the "event without any former parallel in our 
literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the 
memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. 
What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows 
clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of ap- 
proval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!" 

The growth of Emerson's influence reveals itself in 
the sale within a month of Sive hundred printed copies 
of this oration. One of these found its way to Chelsea 
and elicited from Carlyle the words: "God be thanked 
for it! I could have wept to read that speech." 

The "Journal" for April 1, 1838, contains this inter- 
esting entry : — 

" Cool or cold, windy, clear day. The Divinity School 
youths wish to talk with me concerning Theism. I 



72 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

went rather heavy-hearted, for I always find that my 
views chill or shock people at the first opening. But the 
conversation went well and I came away cheered. I 
told them that a preacher should be a poet smit with 
love of the harmonies of moral nature; — and yet look at 
the Unitarian Association, and see if its aspect is poetic. 
They all smiled. No. A minister nowadays is plainest 
prose, the prose of prose. He is a warming-pan, a night- 
chair at sick-beds and rheumatic souls." 

The little scene limns itself with a distinctness not 
usual in Emersonian anecdote. There is the question 
so justly purposed, yet so unfair, as if the organizations 
of poets should be rhapsodic any more than the organ- 
izations of wine-growers should be bacchanalian. There 
is the pleased smile so lightly won and yet, it is to be 
feared, so sanguinely and magnifyingly interpreted — 
Emerson mildly beaming at the success of his thought, 
which was perhaps after all only the success of his wit- 
ticism. The meeting is thought to be the preliminary to 
the famous Divinity School Address, delivered by Emer- 
son on Sunday evening, July 15, 1838, at Divinity Col- 
lege, Cambridge, by invitation of the graduating class. 
The occasion was customary and official, yet the stu- 
dents appear to have been the sole authors of a choice for 
which the authorities were, or claimed to be, respon- 
sible. The latter no doubt felt that Emerson's poetic 
bent insured his position among the non-combatants, 
and could not foreshadow "the sword in myrtles drest*' 
which that mild adventurer was to bear into the heart 
of their unsuspecting conclave. 

The indignation of official Unitarianism at an ad- 



"FULL CIRCLE" 73 

dress wMch reduced the divine prerogatives of Christ to 
universal human attributes is both expHcable and par- 
donable. Christianity had freed itself with difficulty, 
in parts of Europe, at the epoch of the Reformation, 
from the superstitions and corruptions it had admitted 
under the sway of the mediaeval Roman Church. It had 
shed these incrustations and infections only to fall under 
the spell — in New England and other communities — 
of the terror and ferocity which the malign genius of 
Calvin had distilled into the most humane of religions. 
The confutation and partial displacement of Calvinism 
was a service that gave the leaders of Unitarianism a 
claim on the gratitude of mankind, and the Christianity 
which they established was probably the most rational 
and benign form assumed by that religion since the first 
century of its era. They were justified in the hope of a 
prosperous future. Unitarianism, in New England, in 
1838, had just seen the expiration of its first half-cen- 
tury (dating from the revision of the King's Chapel 
liturgy in 1785), and its establishment at Harvard Col- 
lege could be reached by a retrospect of thirty-three 
years. The domination of the childish superstition of 
Rome and of the inhuman theology of Geneva had been 
reckoned by centuries; a relatively rational and humane 
cult might expect much of its hold on mankind. The 
disillusion, the dismay and trepidation, produced by a 
remonstrance like Emerson's (equally exasperating, of 
course, by its vigor and its mildness) was embittered by 
the peculiarities of the occasion. The rebel had invaded 
their own purlieus; he had been cradled in their own 
faith; and had aimed his blow at the most vital and the 



74 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

most vulnerable part of every denomination, the young 
recruits to its ministry. As Dr. Garnett says, "The 
shepherds of Harvard could hardly be expected to allow 
the wolf to carry off the lambs in their very presence, 
even at the invitation of the innocents themselves." 
In one respect the passage of time has justified their 
contention. Emerson's object in his iconoclasm was 
avowedly nothing more than a replenished warmth and 
vitality in religious faith; his victory, which was com- 
plete, has afforded a singularly clear test of the efficacy 
of his prescription; and the praise of its success must be 
left to those who find Unitarian or other fervor greater 
in our time than in the days of Channing. 

Of the fitness of the new ideas for Emerson himself, 
there can be no question; the doubt relates only to 
the preparedness of the disciples. Emerson may have 
played the part of the man who puts out a modest wood- 
fire by throwing upon it too massive a chunk of coal. 

Be this as it may, the Unitarian clergy proceeded to 
show that the fervor of wrath, at all events, was not 
extinct in their denomination. The "Christian Exam- 
iner," the official organ, declared the "notions" to be 
utterly distasteful to the instructors of the school and 
to Unitarian ministers generally, by whom they are es- 
teemed to be "neither good divinity nor good sense." 
Andrews Norton, father of Charles Eliot Norton, the 
head, or at least, the right arm, of Unitarian polemics, 
met the address with an "emphatic anathema" in the 
** Boston Daily Advertiser." A year later, at the next 
annual address to the graduating class, his wrath vented 
itself in a retaliatory discourse on the "Latest Form of 



"FULL CIRCLE" 75 

Infidelity." In the debates of the " Boston Association " 
men did not hesitate to call Emerson "a downright 
atheist." The estrangement of Harvard was so com- 
plete that nearly thirty years elapsed before Emerson 
was again invited to speak within its walls. 

Emerson's part in the ensuing controversy has been 
likened by Dr. Holmes to that "of Patroclus when the 
Greeks and Trojans fought over his body." Mr. Charles 
J. Woodbury (author of an excellent book, "Talks with 
Emerson"), not to be surpassed even by the unsurpass- 
able Dr. Holmes in felicity of simile, compares him still 
more pointedly to the storm-centre of a cyclone, main- 
taining an absolute calm in the midst of the turbulence 
that encloses it. If his silence was magnanimous, it was 
also, in effect at least, strategical. If he had replied to 
his adversaries, he would have staked his cause on the 
cogency of his polemic, and conquest of his opponents 
on their own ground was uncertain. But his silence left 
their argument face to face with his intuitions, which 
were "as the air, invulnerable" to the blows from the 
"partizans" of his assailants. There is no answer to 
the expression of a profound spiritual conviction except 
the expression of a spiritual conviction still profounder, 
and this answer his antagonists were in no position to 
give. 

The chivalry of Emerson toward his opponents is 
pleasantly reflected in an instance of punctilio reported 
by Miss Elizabeth Peabody . That lady begged Emerson 
to re-insert in the printed copy of his address a qualify- 
ing and cautionary passage which ^had been omitted 
at the time of delivery. He reflected, and said, "No: 



76 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

these gentlemen have committed themselves against 
what I did read; and it would not be courteous or 
fair to spring upon them this passage now, which would 
convict them of an unwarranted inference." This is 
fairly to luxuriate in magnanimity; it is the libertinage 
of generosity : but the anecdote is too instructive to be 
spared. Another curious point reported by Miss Pea- 
body is Emerson's refusal to print the "friend of man" 
with a capital F. "No," said Emerson, "directly I put 
that large F in they will all go to sleep." The Scripture 
injunction was remembered, and the dove was a little 
serpentine. 

His wife confirmed his resolution of silence. A pas- 
sage from the "Journal" deserves citation: — 

"What said my brave Asia concerning the paragraph 
writers, to-day? that *this whole practice of self -justi- 
fication and recrimination betwixt literary men seemed 
every whit as low as the quarrels of the Paddies.' 

"Then said I, *But what will you say, excellent Asia, 
when my smart article comes out in the paper, in reply 
to Mr. A. and Dr. B.?' *Why, then,' answered she, *I 
shall feel the first emotion of fear and sorrow on your 
account.' — *But do you know,' I asked, *how many 
fine things I have thought of to say to these fighters? 
They are too good to be lost.' *Then,' rejoined the 
queen, * there is some merit in being silent.'" 

If two angels set up housekeeping together, that law 
of polarity, of which Emerson was inordinately fond, 
would induce one to adopt the part of paragon and the 
other that of scape-grace. The part which Emerson 
preferred to assume in the conjugal encounter is clearly 



"FULL CIRCLE" ; 77 

disclosed in the above narrative. One is half pleased to 
find him confessing, even in jest, a relish for his own 
felicities. 

The relations of Emerson and the Reverend Henry 
Ware, formerly his chief at the Second Church, and now 
the foremost professor of divinity at Cambridge, were 
not so much modified as defined by the delivery of the 
famous "Address." Ware, on the night of delivery, had 
expressed a general approval which the sober counsels 
of a meditative night induced him, in a gentle and con- 
siderate letter, to modify or retract. Emerson replied 
in a letter which all his lovers must cherish and the 
spirit of which must be divined from the single clause 
that space permits us to extract: "I could not pay the 
nobleness of my friends so mean a compliment as to 
suppress my opposition to their supposed views out of 
fear of offense." On September 23, Ware preached 
against Emerson's views or the views associated with 
Emerson's name in a sermon entitled "The Personality 
of God." Some manly and lovable words accompanied 
the copy of this address which he forwarded to Emerson. 
The reply must be quoted in full: — 

Concord, October 8, 1838. 
My deae Sir, — I ought sooner to have acknowl- 
edged your kind letter of last week, and the sermon it 
accompanied. The letter was right manly and noble. 
The sermon, too, I have read with attention. If it 
assails any doctrine of mine, — perhaps I am not so 
quick to see it as writers generally, — certainly I did 
not feel any disposition to depart from my habitual 




78 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

contentment, that you should say your thought, whilst 
I say mine. I believe I must tell you what I think of my 
new position. It strikes me very oddly that good and 
wise men at Cambridge and Boston should think of 
raising me into an object of criticism. I have always 
been — from my very incapacity of methodical writing 
— a " chartered libertine," free to worship and free to 
rail, — lucky when I could make myself understood, 
but never esteemed near enough to the institutions and 
mind of society to deserve the notice of the masters of 
literature and religion. I have appreciated fully the 
advantages of my position, for I well know there is no 
scholar less willing or less able than myself to be a 
polemic. I could not give an account of myself, if chal- 
lenged. I could not possibly give you one of the "argu- 
ments " you cruelly hint at, on which any doctrine of mine 
stands; for I do not know what arguments are in ref- 
erence to any expression of a thought. I dehght in tell- 
ing what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, 
or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men. 
I do not even see that either of these questions admits of 
an answer. So that in the present droll posture of my 
affairs, when I see myself suddenly raised to the impor- 
tance of a heretic, I am very uneasy when I advert to the 
supposed duties of such a personage, who is to make 
good his thesis against all comers. I certainly shall do no 
such thing. I shall read what you and other good men 
write, as I have always done, glad when you speak my 
thoughts, and skipping the page that has nothing for 
me. I shall go on just as before, seeing whatever I can, 
and telling what I see; and, I suppose, with the same 



"FULL CIRCLE" 79 

fortune that has hitherto attended me, — the joy of 
finding that my abler and better brothers, who work with 
the sympathy of society, loving and beloved, do now 
and then unexpectedly confirm my conceptions, and 
find my nonsense is only their own thought in motley, — 
and so I am your affectionate servant, 

R. W. Emerson. 

This letter is peculiarly interesting in its ready — 
nay its almost gloating — avowal of the two intellectual 
sins that have been most stoutly laid to Emerson's ac- 
count — the incapacity for methodical writing, and the 
inability to reason. His meekness on the latter point is 
really Olympian : " for I do not know what arguments 
are in reference to any expression of a thought." The 
"babe-like Jupiter" that Emerson was could not coo 
more innocently after the launching of his thunderbolt. 
Our critique of "Nature" and "The American Scholar" 
in a later chapter will enable the reader to divine the 
extent of our commiseration for this deplored and 
dreaded incapacity for methodical writing. Emerson's 
testimony on the second point, the inability to reason, 
is almost equally authoritative. It is curious, though it 
proves nothing, that the clause quoted above in which 
he denies his power to argue is introduced by a causal 
"for"; in other words, it states a reason, and an argu- 
ment is nothing more than a reason militant, a reason 
armed to meet and overcome doubt. Furthermore, let 
us note that he has "appreciated fully the advantages 
of [his] position." He has, indeed; he is not the man to 
spare his opponents one jot or tittle of those formidable 



80 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

incapacities. Emerson knew or felt in some obscure 
corner of his consciousness or unconsciousness the su- 
preme artistic finish, the aesthetic and tactical effect- 
iveness, of this alleged helplessness which gave to his 
admitted powers so ample a field and so perfect a shel- 
ter. His characteristic humor — the humor of treating 
himself like a penniless waif or lovable imbecile of the 
Dickensian type — is finely exhibited in the letter, and 
the spirit of the whole, after all deductions for strategic 
play and delicate poses, is as courageous and generous 
as the most exigent of his spoiled admirers could de- 
sire. 

A few citations from the "Journals" will clarify still 
further Emerson's state of mind : — 

"I have usually read that a man suffered more from 
one hard word than he enjoyed from ten good ones. My 
own experience does not confirm the saying. The cen- 
sure (I either know or fancy) does not hit me; and the 
praise is very good." 

The amount of elasticity or versatility in Emerson 
may be roughly gauged by comparing this hospitality 
to praise with the following passage dated twenty-six 
days later: — 

"I hate to be defended in a newspaper ... as soon 
as honied words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one 
that lies unprotected before his enemies." 

It is curious to find the most violent of his reported 
utterances on this subject directed toward his champions. 

The ensuing passage shows that sensitiveness in 
heroism, that temperance in fortitude, which human 
nature craves in its models : — 



"FULL CIRCLE" 81 

"It is difficult not to be affected by sour faces. . . . 
The state is so new and strange and unpleasing that a 
man will, maugre all his resolutions, lose his sweetness 
and his flesh, he will pine and fret.'* 

But, in a later entry, the key is altogether manly, and 
humility is opposed to scorn: — 

"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dream- 
ing that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. 
No man, I think, had ever a greater well-being with a 
less desert than I. I can very well afford to be counted 
bad or fooKsh by a few dozen or a few hundred persons 

— I who see myself greeted by the good expectation of 
so many friends far beyond any power of thought or 
communication of thought residing in me. Besides, I 
own, I am often inclined to take part with those who 
say I am bad or foolish, for I fear I am both. I believe 
and know there must be a perfect compensation. I 
know too well my own dark spots. Not having myself 
attained, not satisfied myself, far from a holy obedi- 
ence, how can I expect to satisfy others, to command 
their love? A few sour faces, a few biting paragraphs, 

— is but a cheap expiation for all these shortcomings 
of mine." 

Heroism is prone to fortify itself by two opposite 
expedients, by minimizing its sufferings and so lifting 
itself to the plane of the superhuman, or by magnifying 
their extent, and thus putting in a clearer light the 
intrepidity of its resistance. Emerson recognizes that 
the assaults are trying without admitting that they are 
weighty, and will not humor his vanity to the extent 
of calling himself either invulnerable or magnanimous. 



82 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



1 



The genuineness of a high attitude has seldom been 
better authenticated. 

It is time to say a word or two of three members of 
the group of friends who made up Emerson's intimate 
circle in the simple but select society of Concord. 

Between 1836 and 1846, Margaret Fuller was "an 
estabhshed friend and frequent inmate of our house, 
and was accustomed, during this period, to come, once 
in three or four months, to spend a week or a fort- 
night with us." The remarkable person who impressed 
strongly the New England of her time and who had the 
knack of eliciting homage from people far abler and 
worthier than herseK remains, at our present distance, 
one of the most inscrutable of personalities. There is no 
lack of clear-cut, even of poignant and mordant, traits, 
but in the wilderness of attributes one searches fruit- 
lessly for the evasive character: one chases Margaret 
through Margaret in vain. It is not merely that her pub- 
lished writings give slight indications either of intellectual 
eminence or of that temperamental vigor which would 
account for her mastership in conversation, — that they 
suggest, indeed, either an astonishing good luck with 
her contemporaries or a grave misadventure with pos- 
terity, — but that even the "Memorabiha" which the 
piety of her friends has compiled do not convey the 
impression which they obviously wish to convey. Poor 
Emerson conducts his share of the "Memoirs" in a 
ceremonious, laborious fashion, praising assiduously, 
compunctiously, almost apprehensively, bringing up 
each new excellence for the inspection of the sceptical 



"FULL CIRCLE" 83 

reader with an anxious "There, will that convince you? " 
When he tells us that she wore her friends " like a neck- 
lace of diamonds about her neck," that she resembled 
"the queen of some parliament of love," and that "per- 
sons were her game," his intentions are quite void of 
malevolence. He does not withhold the evidence of her 
childish superstitions (she was given to omens and amu- 
lets), of her colossal egotism which found in America, 
after painstaking search, no intellect comparable to her 
own, of her social veracity which skirted the magnifi- 
cent and the brutal in the same breath. 

The facts half persuade us to believe that Miss 
Fuller, in spite of a coating of masculinity, was at heart 
profoundly feminine, that she was indeterminate, that 
she shared in that receptiveness and plasticity, that 
dependence on suggestion, which has been attributed, 
more or less plausibly, to women so eminent as George 
Eliot and George Sand. The possession of considerable 
ability and of a masterful temper enabled her to screen 
this formlessness and instabihty from the eyes of her 
admiring contemporaries. Her abilities, her pursuits, 
her ardors, were loose, versatile, and tentative. Hence 
that splendor in conversation — that response to the 
mood, the hour — which had too little reality or sta- 
bility to be capable of transference to the printed page 
or of reproduction in spoken words on the ensuing day. 
She was not a strong soul with speech as its appropriate 
and exclusive vehicle; she was a formless being to whom 
speech imparted the semblance of organization. 

These criticisms apply chiefly to the New England 
Margaret, the prodigy and prophetess, the precocious 




84 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

child pampered on Latin and Greek, the student of art, 
the Hterary critic, the editor of the "Dial," the leader 
of exalted conversations, and the cultivator of friend- 
ships on the high level and the grand scale. In Italy, 
1847-50, she was lucky both in fortune and misfortune. 
She won the love and accepted the hand of Angelo 
Ossoli, a plain, affectionate, and faithful young man, in 
whom these merits lost none of their worth by associa- 
tion with an Itahan countship; she bore a child; she 
aided ItaKan freedom by faithful and admirable service 
in hospitals during the siege of Rome; and, imder the 
humanizing influence of contact with the plainer and 
sterner order of reahties, becomes for the first time really 
interesting. She perished with her husband and her 
child off Fire Island Beach, Long Island, in the wreck 
of the Elizabeth, on which the party had taken passage 
for America. 

That Emerson admired and valued Miss Fuller is cer- 
tain, though, as often happens in commerce, the stock 
curiously shrank when tested by an inventory; whether 
he "liked " her is another question. Mr. Cabot is proba- 
bly right in supposing that "a slight shudder quaHfied 
the pleasure with which he welcomed her visits to his 
house." She taught him nothing and the stimulus she 
brought was rather galvanic than intellectual. But 
Emerson's gratitude for stimuh included even influences 
that were momentarily perturbing or distracting, and 
he was always magnetized by the gift of spontaneous 
and eloquent conversation. In animated speech the air 
seemed tremulous with possibilities; a dialogue held 
for him the palpitant interest of a stance. Margaret 



"FULL CIRCLE" 85 

Fuller and other such dominating personalities affected 
him with a vague but kindling sense of power, like the 
rush of unseen wings in the air, or the reverberation of 
the tread of hurrying multitudes in a remote street. 

A person who influenced Emerson far more than the 
spectacular Miss Fuller, whose effect on him was in the 
bold word of the unexaggerating Mr. Cabot "prodi- 
gious," was A. Bronson Alcott, a native of Connecticut, 
who in 1835 first met Emerson and who settled with his 
wife and daughters in Concord in 1840. The peculiarity 
of this remarkable personage may be compressed into a 
few words: his mind became, in a rare and surprising 
degree, the exclusive domicile — one might almost say 
property — of three or four lofty and interior princi- 
ples. To this result his rustic birth, meagre schooling, 
and scant opportunities had doubtless contributed by 
leaving his mind comparatively void of secondary ac- 
complishments, ideas, and motives. Alcott was cooped 
up, so to speak, in his very infinitudes. He appears to 
have effected, like Emerson, a fusion of Platonism and 
Christianity, in which the singleness of the world, the 
omnipotence of spirit, and the riches and sanctities of 
the human soul were the cardinal beliefs. 

The devotion he brought to these ideas was as simple 
and absolute as the principles themselves. He organized 
a school in Boston in which the great intellectual and 
moral verities were to be educed from infant minds by 
skiKul interrogatories — an experiment which Boston, 
with the ingenuity of plastic communities in extracting 
a double sensation from the same enterprise, first ac- 
claimed and then anathematized. He bore the unde- 



86 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



II 



served scandal that overwhelmed his undertaking with 
the unalterable sweetness of a disinterested and benig- 
nant mind. He had the childlike innocence which made 
it necessary for Emerson to warn his Enghsh associates 
of his complete untrustworthiness in points of fact, and 
the childlike magnanimity which made it quite safe to 
commit the accusatory letter to his own keeping. Of 
Fruitlands, his socialistic community, a word must be 
said later. He certified to the soundness of his fibre 
by the begetting of Louisa Alcott, the sanest of story- 
writers, was the best of fathers and husbands, abstained 
conscientiously from flesh, and his irreverence for money 
culminated in the sacrilege of giving a mendicant a 
twenty-dollar gold-piece for want of a smaller coin. 

The service of Alcott to Emerson was great and dis- 
tinct. He offered sympathy, he offered comradeship, to 
that part of Emerson's nature which was rarest and 
therefore most solitary. The distinguishing and hence 
the insulative element in Emerson was the extent to 
which highly abstracted principles took shape in his 
mind as vivid realities and commanded an entire devo- 
tion. In this faculty Alcott shared. Emerson, the master 
of hyperbole (who reconciles this function in some ab- 
struse way with that of hater of the superlative), avails 
himself of all his skill in the glorification of his new 
friend. "He has more of the godlike than any man I 
have ever seen." "The most extraordinary man and 
the highest genius of his time. He is a man." Later on, 
he became aware of his limitations; there are seven 
pages of the "Journal" in which the god is taken to 
pieces with amazing expertness and candor: but even 



"FULL CIRCLE" 87 

here dissection takes place, so to speak, upon the altar. 
The place of Alcott in his regard remained unique. 

Alcott is, indeed, a most instructive figiu*e for the 
critic of Emerson; he represents the upper Emerson cut 
off from the lower, and by his limitations and relative 
inefficiency, he illustrates, as nothing else could do, the 
priceless service which this lower Emerson rendered to 
the upper. The Emersonian nature may be figured as 
a sky: its zenith is a point, but its plane of intersection 
with the lower earth, its horizon, in other words, is of 
vast extent. Alcott was pure zenith, and, like that mark 
in the sky, was perhaps more serviceable as a point of 
reference, as an attestation of completeness, than as an 
object of persistent contemplation. His embosomment 
in principles was a comfort and inspiration to Emerson, 
but Emerson loved the principle in its concreteness, its 
fertility, its frolic as it were, no less than in its chaste 
and austere vigils; on the latter side only was Alcott's 
help available. Its value, however, may be clearly in- 
ferred from the following passage in which he answers 
the objection that Alcott 's thoughts are few: "But what 
were many thoughts, if he had not this distinguishing 
Faith, which is a palpable proclamation out of the deeps 
of nature that God yet is? With many thoughts, and 
without this, he would be only one more of a countless 
throng of lettered men; but now you cannot spare the 
fortification that he is." 

Emerson's descriptions of the same man vary so much 
that the measurement of a man's real altitude in his 
mind demands a sort of triangulation, or coordination 
of views from remote standing-points. I may add, with 



88 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



1 



a change of figure, that it is often interesting to note" 
the number of pounds the subject has lost or gained 
between successive weighings. 

From 1842 to 1846 Nathaniel Hawthorne occupied 
the Old Manse, where Emerson had been a frequent 
visitor, and at one time an inmate, in the days of Ezra 
Ripley, and where the novelist was to write the sketch 
that has made its name proverbial. The two men saw 
little of each other: each dwelt in his own tent, as it 
were, and peeped at the other shyly and curiously now 
and again from the rifts in the closed curtain of the door- 
way. Hawthorne returned to Concord in 1852, but the 
restraint on intimacy was never broken. Emerson says: 
"It was easy to talk with him, — there were no barriers, 
— only, he said so little, that I talked too much, and 
stopped only because, as he gave no indications, I 
feared to exceed." He adds (the occasion is the burial 
of Hawthorne) with sincere regret: "Now it appears 
that I waited too long." 

On a single occasion (September, 1842) they so far 
overcame their mutual diffidence as to undertake a two 
days' walk together to visit the community of Shakers 
near the town of Harvard. The days were beautiful, 
and the sights interesting; and it is pleasant to think 
of the two seers and mystics in their leisurely progress 
among the fringed gentians, the grapevines, and the 
wild apple trees, dropping a few mellow words like long- 
ripened fruits into the autumn stillness from time to 
time, and resting themselves from these portentous 
exertions in sunny and fruitful silences. Emerson seems 
to have felt a real esteem for Hawthorne, apart, of 



"FULL CIRCLE" 89 

course, from the latter's unfortunate mistake of adopt- 
ing literature as a profession. "I admired the man, who 
was simple, amiable, truth-loving, and frank in con- 
versation, but I never read his books with pleasure; 
they are too young." It is pleasant to find a critic open- 
minded enough to refuse to allow his estimate of a 
really intelligent man to be biased by such juveniUa as 
"The Scarlet Letter" and "The House of the Seven 
Gables." On another occasion in 1842, he is still more 
generous: "Nathaniel Hawthorne's reputation as a 
writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not 
good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man." 

The last name to be recorded is perhaps the most 
significant of all. Of French (Isle of Jersey) extraction 
and Massachusetts birth and rearing, Henry David 
Thoreau clung tenaciously to Concord all his life, pluck- 
ing an indifferent and casual livelihood from the fields 
and roadsides as land-surveyor. He invented an excel- 
lent pencil, which he perfected and contemptuously 
threw aside, refusing with churlish magnanimity an at- 
tractive offer to bring his invention to the market.^ In 
him wood-craft rose to a species of wood-magic; "he 
knew the country hke a fox or a bird"; loved rigor in 
dates and measurements; abounded in rustic intuitions 
and clairvoyances; had eyes in his feet, drew birds to 
his shoulder and fishes into his hand, and supplied new 
species to the rejoicing Agassiz. The finish of the mere 
organism was superb. There was something of the 

^ Both Thoreau's biographer Mr. F. B. Sanborn (Thoreau, pages 
87-38) and Dr. Emerson, while not denying the anecdote, contest its 
significance, on the ground that Thoreau pursued his father's call- 
ing, intermittently, for many years afterward. 



90 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

animal in his make-up; but the fashions of animaUty 
are various, and Thoreau's fashion was not shaggy or 
stockish or bovine, but keen, nimble, and lithe: he 
reminded Mr. F. B. Sanborn of "some retired philo- 
sophical woodchuck or magnanimous fox." 

He spent two years in austere self-support in a hermit- 
age built by his own hands on the banks of Walden. 
Two years is a time long enough to refute the charge of 
dilettantism yet short enough to lend color to the ac- 
cusation of instability; the proposed demonstration takes 
on the slighter aspect of a feat. His moral conduct shows 
— particularly, on its noblest side, the unflinching an- 
tagonism to slavery — a combination of freak and great- 
heartedness. His brief imprisonment for refusing to pay 
taxes to a slaveholder's government was genuine, no 
doubt, if somewhat erratic; but the effect to-day, on 
persons aware of its actual slightness and its wide pub- 
licity, is sKghtly spectacular. The impressiveness which 
this special recalcitrancy failed to achieve was amply 
secured by many other courageous and manly remon- 
strances in behalf of the suffering blacks. 

Thoreau, on certain sides, might be compared to 
Hawthorne's Donatello in "The Marble Faun," but he 
was a Donatello whose birth had been allotted to a 
community of earnest and austere rehgious feeling and 
whose maturity coincided with the emergence of the 
Transcendentalists. By all precedents the wood-child 
should have shuddered at the sound of the church- 
bells, but Thoreau touched the crest of paradox in re- 
sponding profoundly, not perhaps to the bells, but to the 
influences they typified. If Emerson hardly did justice 



"FULL CIRCLE" 91 

to his good luck in securing a faun and a mystic under 
the cover of a single epidermis, the cause may be sought 
in the fact that the invaluable pecuUarity of Thoreau's 
organization did not shape his philosophy, or even, in 
any strict or entire sense, dominate his authorship. One 
would have prophesied of such a man that his culture 
would have been indigenous, his literature unsophisti- 
cated, and his philosophy original. In the actual out- 
come, his culture was classic and Oriental, his writing 
markedly literary, and his view of life (wood-craft 
apart) to all appearances imitative. 

He had a high hterary gift, an English far less striking 
and rich but far more readable and more of a piece than 
Emerson's, full of nimble turns and darting figures, pos- 
sessed, indeed, of a gliding suppleness and flowing vi- 
vacity which he might have caught from his French 
ancestors or from the perches in Walden. The bent of 
his mind is clearly expressed in the circumstance that 
his natural history, however copious or precise, never 
trammels his literature, and that, clear and sure as his 
vision and knowledge may be, it is less the profile than 
the savor of nature that his pages vividly reproduce. 
His verse had freedom and sincerity. 

The philosophy which interrupts the idyl with rather 
vexatious frequency is mostly a defence of genuineness: 
yet, oddly enough, it affects the reader not as insincere 
but as derivative. Concord noted in Thoreau the intona- 
tions of Emerson's voice, and Emerson caught the same 
reverberation in his mind. This is the reason, no doubt, 
why the superlatives bestowed upon Thoreau are no 
more bountiful than those lavished upon persons who 




92 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

have far less the air of having been planned by Provi- 
dence to actualize a dream of Emerson. It is true that 
Thoreau professed independence of mankind, and that 
his friend blames him for paradox and contradiction, 
but both of these habits are, after all, fashions of relat- 
ing one's self to the society of one's time. The truth 
is that his intellectual plasticity was attended by a vein 
of temperamental stubbornness and wiKulness, and his 
consciousness of debt to Emerson may have sharpened 
his appetite for contradiction. 

Whatever doubts or differences flecked the surface 
of their friendship, its depths were untroubled, and its 
cordiality and fidehty remained unimpaired at the time 
of Thoreau's death in 1862. Emerson had befriended 
Thoreau ia the latter's college days, and, later, on two 
distiact occasions, iavited him to share the Emerson 
domicile for years at a time. His presence in the house 
duriag Emerson's second trip to Europe ia 1847-48 was 
a main reassurance to the sohcitudes of the traveller. 
His knowledge of graf tiug proved of benefit to a philoso- 
pher's orchard; he had the homely knacks and skills 
which propitiate the least mundane of housewives; and 
the fealty of the children was unshakable from the start. 
In the fact that he was loved by children and hated by 
mediocrities, he has two lastiug titles to the esteem of 
sane men, and the command of rare materials and dis- 
tiaguished style should keep his prose at least peren- 
nially notable. 

The briefest account of Emerson's Concord circle 
would be incomplete without some mention of a lady 
for whom his feeUng was profound and pecuKar, Miss 



. "FULL CIRCLE" 93 

Elizabeth Hoar, formerly the betrothed of his brother 
Charles, and inheritor, in a sense, of the fraternal rights 
of Charles in his heart. What individualizes this woman 
among his friends is not the superlative terms in which 
she is recommended — there is hardly any friend whom 
he does not from time to time enwrap in a tissue of super- 
latives — but the total absence of those retrocessionals 
or palinodes to which, in the privacy of the "Jour- 
nals," nearly every one except his kith and kin is Hable. 
Of her he says in an emphatic phrase where italics lend 
incisiveness to brevity: *' Elizabeth Hoar consecrates." 
His praise is substantiated by the clearness of this 
woman's eyes, as they meet us in the Hartwell crayon 
of the "Journals," and by the worth and wit of her say- 
ings as recorded in those volumes. She shared largely 
in that peculiar trait of the Emersonian stock and circle 
which enabled them to say "good things" in the Ughtest 
and the gravest sense of that varying adjective, and 
which almost justifies the French in their double ap- 
plication of the word "esprit" to the third person of the 
trinity and to the sallies of Voltaire. It is doubtful 
whether, after the death of his brothers, any other friend 
came so close to his intellectual and rehgious sympathies. 
Another person whom Emerson highly valued, or, at 
least, conscientiously esteemed, was Sarah Alden (Brad- 
ford) Ripley, wife of Samuel Ripley, Emerson's uncle, 
a clergyman, who moved from Waltham to Concord in 
1846. (The reader who has lost his clew in the tangle 
of the Emerson relationships may be thankful to be 
reminded that Phebe Emerson, the paternal grand- 
mother of Ralph Waldo, was married, after her first 



94 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

husband's death, to Dr. Ezra Ripley of Concord, and 
that Samuel Ripley, a son of this marriage, was there- 
fore half-brother to Waldo's father, William Emerson.) 
Mrs. Sarah Ripley was a person the fame of whose 
Greek and science is still faintly audible to our inatten- 
tive generation and who seems to have extenuated these 
dubious accompKshments by the possession of a keen 
wit and a kind heart. Moncure D. Conway, whose 
work, "Emerson at Home and Abroad," is described by 
Miss Ehzabeth Peabody, in a phrase whose succulence 
is inexhaustible, as "a beautiful apotheosis," classes 
Sarah Ripley with Emerson's mother and his Aunt Mary 
in the group of "Three Fates" who presided over the 
seer's life. In a chapter entitled "Concordia" he re- 
lates the following: "I had heard at Cambridge a story 
that Audubon called once to consult this lady on the 
lichens of her neighborhood, and found her hearing at 
once the lesson of a Harvard student in differential 
calculus, correcting the translation of another from 
Sophocles, at the same time shelling peas, and rocking 
her grandchild's cradle with her foot." Emerson re- 
cords with interest that she wilHngly carried through 
the leading streets of Boston a broom which the in- 
domitable Aunt Mary, as a touchstone of character, had 
put into her hand — a fact significant to us through its 
evident significance for Emerson, 

In a survey of Emerson's Concord associations, one 
is struck by the fact that his more intimate or at least 
more sedulous companions. Miss Fuller, Alcott, Ellery 
Channing, and Thoreau, make up a pecuhar group of 
not too sharply defined and by no means wholly amiable 



"FULL CIRCLE" 95 

or sympathetic personalities. This fact is accentuated 
by the ease with which one could select from Emerson's 
remoter ties or less continuous associates a group of 
distinct, normal, and lovable characters, — let us say 
for instance, Henry Ware, W. H. Furness, James Elliot 
Cabot, and John Sterling. This may be partly explained 
by the further fact that a certain bumptiousness may 
have been needed to overleap even the outer barriers of 
Emerson's constitutional reserve; it may also have de- 
pended in part on the probability that no one of the 
latter group would have carried a broom, or, to make 
the example adequately masculine, have propelled a 
wheelbarrow across Boston Common between Summer 
and Hancock Streets. It seems clear that Emerson, at 
this period of his life, welcomed in his companionship 
a tartness, a sharp tang or high seasoning, which set 
at rest his dread of the conventional. 



It is now our duty to say something of the "Dial," 
the quarterly magazine (Emerson, in contempt of ety- 
mology, calls it a quarterly "Journal") which served 
from 1840 to 1844 as the mouthpiece of the Transcen- 
dental impulse. It was edited for two years by Margaret 
Fuller, with the assistance of George Ripley, and, on 
the break-down of her health, was handed over to the 
reluctant but faithful tutelage of Emerson. Each num- 
ber was supposed to comprise one hundred and thirty- 
six octavo pages, prose and verse, divided into rela- 
tively brief articles of which the first number contained 



96 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

twenty-seven. Its price was three dollars a year, its 
subscription list numbered two hundred and fifty, and 
steadily contracted; and it fled forlornly from discour- 
aged publisher to publisher. A duration of four years 
under such handicaps is almost to be described as lon- 
gevity. 

The two great supports of later periodical literature, 
the solid authoritative article on the timely subject and 
the attractive short tale or novel, were either excluded 
from the "Dial" or found but casual and intermittent 
access to its pages. The magazine, under Emerson's 
direction at least, was benignant, in its preoccupied 
way, toward social progress, but it was a roving, or at 
best a planless and inconsecutive, benignity; it left the 
reformer hungry and half pleased. The commercial 
value of such matter was clearly brought out in the 
fact that an article by Theodore Parker on a temperance 
embroilment sold an entire issue, and the blindness or 
indifference of the management to such results is inter- 
estingly suggested by the belated and grudging approval 
which Emerson, then editor, conceded to the manu- 
script. It would seem that in the "Dial" it was the 
airy matter that fell flat, and the earthy and massive 
substance that gave buoyancy to the enterprise. 

The prevalent ridicule of Transcendentalism no 
doubt told against the success of the venture. The sui- 
cidal suggestion had been made to call the magazine 
the " Transcendent alist," but Alcott, tactful for once, 
had interposed with the not infelicitous substitute, the 
"Dial," and averted what would have been in effect 
the drowning of the child in the baptismal font. The 



"FULL CIRCLE" 97 

prospectus by R. W. Emerson was sky-colored, and, 
even in the attempts to be practical, the same idealism 
is amusingly perceptible. Emerson writes: "It should 
— should it not? — be a degree nearer to the hodiernal 
facts than my writings are." This is really delectable, 
particularly that open-minded "Should it not.^^" The 
style of "Nature" and "The Over-Soul" is to be low- 
ered hy one degree and thus brought within the range of 
the magazine public. A firmer grasp of the practical 
situation was clearly necessary at a time when even 
Holmes, afterwards so warm a friend to Emerson, could 
amuse Harvard with mockery of the new sect, and when 
two of its own supporters, J. F. Clarke and C. P. 
Cranch, could beguile their leisure with caricatures of its 
failings. Pecuniary strictures added to the embarrass- 
ment. The contributions were not remunerated and the 
salary of the editor was fixed with parsimony and paid 
with meanness, — ■ conditions under which — without 
impugning Miss Fuller's veracity — the health of most 
magazine editors would be subject to breakdown. Add 
to these causes the two great shrinkages that distract 
an editor's life, the shrinkage in "ability" when it 
hardens into "articles" and the shrinkage in approba- 
tion when congealed into subscriptions, and the hard- 
ships of the "Dial" become only too intelligible. 

The impression in our own day is very general that 
the journals and magazines are demoralized by that 
subservience to the pubHc taste which seems, in prac- 
tice, to go hand-in-hand with the least respectful esti- 
mate of the quality of that taste. A pecuHar interest 
is thereby imparted to a question which the "Dial" is 



98 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

peculiarly qualified to resolve : what would be the actual 
merit of a periodical in which the pursuit of literary 
and ethical aims should be quite unhindered by the wish 
to cajole, to humor, or to propitiate the pubUc? In the 
"Dial" the 'purgation at all events is complete; the 
meannesses are expelled; it takes, as Mr. Cabot ob- 
serves, the highest tone upon all subjects; the work, 
strong or weak, is that of men who sincerely want the 
best, — a want which is itself an excellence. 

Moreover, the "Dial's" share in the preservative 
storax and chlorine and rosemary at which people 
laughed in the Divinity School Address is noticeable; 
its freshness, even to-day, has rather lessened than dis- 
appeared. The particular interests of our time do not 
animate its pages; in that case they would cease to be 
particular. But the remarkable thing is the "Dial's" 
relative independence of the particular interests of yes- 
terday. Reviews of local concerts and exhibitions of 
pictures, of books whose interest was temporary, recall 
the passage of time to the present-day reader; but much 
of the "Dial" is either applicable to-day, or, at least, 
could be readily conceived as becoming newly appli- 
cable to-morrow. 

On the question of literary merit, it is only just to 
remember that Emerson, on the whole America's best 
man, contributed to the "Dial" three well-known lec- 
tures, "The Transcendentalist," "Man the Reformer," 
and "The Young American," three brief but distinctive 
essays, "Gifts," "The Comic," and the second "Art," 
several reviews comprising some of his weightiest judg- 
ments on books, and from fifteen to twenty poems, in- 



*'FULL CIRCLE" 99 

eluding some of the prime " nurslings of immortality," 
"The Snow-Storm," "The Problem," and the first 
"Wood-Notes." This magazine, also, introduced Tho- 
reau to his contemporaries. The other writers were of 
an order fit, not to compete, but to consort and to 
coalesce, with these refulgencies. When it is added that 
all the contributors, even Emerson, were novices in 
literature, that they were drawn, mostly or wholly, from 
a narrow section of a small province of a pushing in- 
dustrial commonwealth, the high average merit of 
thought and style in their experiments assumes height- 
ened and freshened significance. 

The fecundation of rehgion by thought and Kterature, 
the quitenew valuation both of intellect and taste which 
results from their engagement as aids and servants of 
the spiritual life, is an outstanding peculiarity of the 
group. A high refinement, which is the complement of 
this spirituality, becomes inimical to substance in the 
feebler writers, and is more favorable to the dehcacy of 
the fluid and sometimes florid prose than to the main- 
tenance of distinct form in the loose-traihng and, so to 
speak, wind-blown verses. We find something a little 
cloistral, a little expectant, a little feminine, or (com- 
bining the two last traits) even a little virginal, in the 
attitude of these firstlings of the nascent spirit. They 
express a hope so new that its confines are still imper- 
ceptible. Except in Emerson, the very piety seems 
largely hope: they give us less the authentic and realized 
vision than the prophetic thrill which traverses the soul 
when the curtains of the innermost sanctities begin visi- 
bly and urgently to palpitate. It may be remarked in 



100 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

passing that the choice of subjects for Emerson's contri- 
butions to the "Dial" suggests his willingness to show to 
the world in this relation not his worldly (the non-exist- 
ent is hardly subject to exhibition) , but his mundane, side. 
One other fact, at once piquant and important, must 
be specified. Nature satirized the emphasis which this 
band of devotees gave to the isolation of the private 
soul by imparting to their work a mocking homogeneity. 
These apostles of unlikeness preach the gospel of diver- 
gence in tones that are almost indistinguishable. Miss 
E. L. Gary, in her "Emerson, Poet and Thinker," — 
a book whose intelHgence is unfairly obscured by its 
popularity or rather by its quest for popularity, — 
points out "how closely many of Emerson's associates 
were in sympathy with his opinions," and illustrates 
her point by convincing citations from Hedge and Rip- 
ley. Was Emerson the common guide .^^ A comparison 
of ages and a due estimate of the scantness and newness 
of the Concord seer's pubHcations seem almost to pre- 
clude the hypothesis of discipleship. Strong doubt ap- 
pears to be thrown upon the supposition that Emerson's 
brain was the special and peculiar retort in which Pla- 
tonic, German, French, and Enghsh ideas were fused 
and recrystalKzed into the form with which his genius 
is so constantly associated. It seems probable that the 
causes of this special development were not personal^ 
since the result appears in other men than Emerson 
at nearly the same time, nor universal, since England, 
Germany, and France had access to all the ingredients 
and had, abstractly, quite as good a right as Massa- 
chusetts to the invention of the mixture: rather it was 



"FULL CIRCLE" 101 

local, the product of conditions peculiar at that epoch 
to New England, and definable perhaps as an unrivaled 
parity or equilibrium between three great impulses, the 
cravings for religion, thought, and beauty. 

Emerson was not a wilHng editor. His father had 
been prominent in the conduct of the "Monthly An- 
thology," a magazine which Holmes reviews in his life 
of Ralph Waldo in the same spirit of amused and in- 
dulgent curiosity in which Austin Dobson might have 
contemplated a satin slipper or a peacock fan of the 
seventeenth or eighteenth century. The son in earlier 
times had entertained with momentary gusto the pro- 
ject of a magazine of which he and his brothers were to 
bear the intellectual expense. But at the date we have 
now reached he had formed that combination of fixity 
and elasticity in his habits which made him uneasy and 
restive under the cramp of a novel obligation. He had 
written in 1839, "I will never be editor," yet, when, in 
1842, Miss Fuller and the "Dial" parted, each in need 
of a sick-nurse, Emerson, who hated invalids, became 
dutifully responsible for the care of the latter. He per- 
formed his uncongenial duties with fidehty, and the 
death of his patient in 1844 was a relief which no doubt 
helped him to face calmly the payment (as it seems) 
of three hundred dollars from his own pocket to meet 
outstanding obligations. 



The sterling sincerity of the men who supported the 
"Dial" was attested by the embarkation of many of 



102 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

their number in an undertaking which, like the literary- 
enterprise, was unfortunate, yet neither unblest nor 
ignoble in its career or its catastrophe. "The Brook- 
Farm Association for Industry and Education," as it 
was called, was organized in the double hope of substi- 
tuting mutual help for competition and at the same 
time conserving, in its fullness, even in its rigor, the 
liberty of the individual. A farm was purchased at West 
Roxbury about 1841 ; a joint-stock company was formed, 
and an annual interest of five per cent was guaranteed on 
shares consisting of a hundred dollars each. The surplus 
profits, after expenses (including interest) were paid, 
were to be distributed among the individual members in 
amounts proportioned to the work each had performed. 
Each member chose his own labor, and fixed the hours 
of his own day; manual and brain work were paid for at 
the same rate. House rent, fuel, food, and clothing were 
guaranteed by the association to every member. An 
excellent school refined and dignified the enterprise. 
The varying membership averaged about seventy. A 
report issued by the directors in 1844 spoke confidently 
of the prosperity of the experiment, but an injudicious 
acceptance of certain elements in the Fourierite scheme 
and the burning of the phalanstery in 1847 subjected 
the organization to a strain which overtaxed its imma- 
ture powers. In the autunm of 1847 it broke up. 

The failure merely illustrated an old rule; more signif- 
icant was the moral atmosphere of the place which seems 
to have combined amenity and pungency in felicitous 
proportions. Mr. Frothingham's epithet is "sunny"; 
Emerson says that the most fastidious called it the 



"FULL CIRCLE" 103 

pleasantest of residences. Emerson's utterances on the 
subject are of varying tenor and temperature; it is one 
of the many topics in one's traffic with the philosopher 
in which you can take your estimate, hot from the oven 
or cold from the refrigerator, at your choice. At one 
point ^ "the parching air burns frore," but the ice dis- 
solves in other places, and the tone of his review of 
"Brook Farm" is benignant though amused and con- 
descending. He calls it, with a good nature that is 
perhaps quite as destructive as malice, "a perpetual 
picnic, a French Revolution in small, an Age of Reason 
in a patty-pan." On the subject of the married women's 
objections to the common nursery, he almost chuckles: 
"Eggs might be hatched in ovens, but the hen on her 
own account much preferred the old way. A hen with- 
out her chickens was but half a hen." He appreciates 
Mr. Ripley's pregnant anecdote: "There is your ac- 
complished friend : he would hoe corn all Sun- 
day if I would let him, but all Massachusetts could not 
make him do it on Monday." 

Emerson's own relation to the movement is happily 
described by Dr. Holmes as "tangential." The ques- 
tion of joining the association had deeply exercised both 
his intelligence and conscience. What is a philosopher 
to do who is lured and repelled by strong forces at the 
same time, who worships courage but distrusts organiza- 
tion, who loves mankind but who prefers the race cut up 
into diminutive morsels, who favors revolution in his 
own way, but who finds that his soul ripens best in the 
placid wontedness of his own study? He writes to Miss 
* See Journals, vi, 373-74. 



104 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Fuller in 1840: "What a brave thing Mr. Ripley has 
done! he stands now at the head of the Church Mili- 
tant." But he adds in the same paragraph: "At the 
name of a society all my repulsions play, all my quills 
rise and sharpen.^' 

At a later meeting in his own house, the quills were 
still more unmannerly. "Yesterday George and Sophia 
Ripley, Margaret Fuller and Alcott discussed here the 
Social Plans. I wished to be convinced, to be thawed, 
to be made nobly mad by the kindlings before my eye 
of a new dawn of human piety. But this scheme was 
arithmetic and comfort: this was a hint borrowed from 
the Tremont House and United States Hotel; a rage in 
our poverty and pohtics to live rich and gentlemanlike; 
an anchor to leeward against a change of weather; a 
prudent forecast on the probable issue of the great 
questions of Pauperism and Poverty. And not once 
could I be inflamed, but sat aloof and thoughtless; my 
voice faltered and fell. It was not the cave of persecu- 
tion which is the palace of spiritual power, but only a 
room in the Astor House hired for the Transcenden- 
tahsts. I do not wish to remove from my present prison 
to a prison a Uttle larger. I wish to break all prisons.** 

We quote only haK the passage: the unquoted half 
corrects in part the impression of a too shrinking fastidi- 
ousness, of an approach to fine-ladyism in the moral 
sphere, which might be left on some minds by the fore- 
cited paragraph. Emerson is certainly a Httle exigent. 
He expects people to produce the effect of a Te Deum 
while engaged in the act of ordering their dinner, and 
rather ignores the possibility that a dinner rationally 



"FULL CIRCLE" 105 

and humanly ordered may have its issue somewhere 
in the heightened praise of God. One is content that 
Emerson should go his own way, but, on a review of 
his various commentaries on Brook Farm, with their 
pointed strictures and their gay condescensions, one 
half wishes for an ampler recognition of those on whom 
the ideal had imposed grave risks and heavy labors. He 
praised Elizabeth Hoar for her discerning application 
of the fine Napoleonic saying, "Respect the burden," 
to Lincoln under the goad of Wendell Phillips's unspar- 
ing oratory. Perhaps a tongue as delicately just and 
gentle as Elizabeth's might have suggested the right of 
Brook Farm to a like measure of chivalrous forbear- 
ance. 

He decided against Brook Farm "very slowly" and 
almost "with penitence"; of Alcott's project for a 
community called Fruitlands near the town of Harvard, 
which struck him as a futile barter of common sense for 
a shabby half-measure of idealism, he made shorter 
work. Indeed, he was so round with Alcott on the sub* 
ject that he was moved to ask that gentleman to pound 
him a little "by way of squaring the account." The 
two EngHshmen, H. C. Wright and Charles Lane, who 
united with Alcott in this ill-judged and ill-fated under- 
taking and whom Emerson had duly but ineffectually 
warned of the mild Platonist's untrustworthiness in 
matters of fact, pleased and teased and tantalized him 
and called into peculiarly active exercise his unique 
faculty for self -reversal or self-contradiction. Thus, on 
page Ml of the sixth volume of the "Journals," he 
names ten "supreme people," who are everlastingly 



106 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

memorable and indispensable to him, and in this chaplet 
of worthies a place is assigned to Charles Lane. But on 
pages 411-12 of the same volume he is almost beating 
his breast and chanting *'mea culpa** for his total want 
of sympathy for this "alien," this freezing Charles Lane. 
He can even find room for contradictory points of view 
within the embrace of a paragraph. Lane is in one 
place "a pure, superior, mystical, intellectual, and gen- 
tle soul"; in the same sentence he becoioes "a %hter 
in the ring"; and, later on, is a born warrior and expert 
swordsman. This is too Emersonian to be quarrelled 
with: one does not chafe at the presence of nutmegs in 
the Spice Islands. If complaint were anywhere valid, 
it would attach itseK to the deceptive air of totality 
and finality with which these tentative and temporary 
judgments are set forth. Emerson's affirmations re- 
sembled those Roman camps which might change their 
place from night to night, but which gave to each shift- 
ing station in turn the fixed order and defined security 
of a city. 

To return to Fruitlands, the mistakes and vagaries of 
which have been clearly summarized by the editors of 
the "Journals." "High conversation" was too prev- 
alent; the soil is said to have been poor, and the aid of 
animal manures was conscientiously rejected. The list 
of unclean foods, which included the flesh of beasts 
and all products of slave labor, shows a very luxury 
of asceticism, an orgy of relinquishment. "Sugar, tea, 
coffee, chocolate, wine, spices, rice, meat, fish, poultry, 
eggs, milk, butter, cheese, honey, and even fine flour 
were excluded; also wool and cotton." Grains, vegeta- 



"FULL CIRCLE" 107 

bles, and local fruit supplied the meagre table. Emerson 
visited them in July, 1843, and feasted (the word is 
hardly too strong) on the nobility and delicacy of the 
moral atmosphere. But even in the enthusiasm of this 
first impression, his good sense asks shrewdly: What 
about December? Midwinter was not slow to substanti- 
ate these misgivings; the approach of starvation broke 
up the little community; and an ox-sled brought back 
to Concord the four "Httle women" and the shattered 
illusions of the Alcott household. 

Emerson's aversion to communities must not be held 
to indicate an indifference to the social problems of 
which these organizations were the hasty outcome. He 
felt keenly that the economic needs of man were met by 
processes that had no root in his spiritual nature; he 
wished to simplify life, but he doubted if the road to 
simplification lay in the forming of clumsy and mechani- 
cal aggregates. He would have had the philosopher get 
his food from his own land by his own exertion, dispens- 
ing so far as possible with mercenary and servile in- 
termediaries. He had even the temerity to propose 
experiments in his own household, a field that often 
daunts innovators who feel quite equal to the recon- 
struction of a state. The fate of one of these attempts 
is recorded in a letter to his brother William: — 

"You know Lidian and I had dreamed that we would 
adopt the country practice of having but one table in 
the house. Well, Lidian went out the other evening and 
had an explanation on the subject with the two girls. 
Louisa accepted the plan with great kindness and readi- 
ness; but Lydia, the cook, firmly refused. A cook was 



108 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

never fit to come to table, etc. The next morning Waldo 
was sent to announce to Louisa that breakfast was 
ready; but she had eaten already with Lydia, and re- 
fused to leave her alone. With our other project we are 
like to have the same fortune, as Mrs. Alcott is as much 
decided not to come as her husband is ready to come.'* 

The spectacle of a project which had interested the 
intellect and conscience of the foremost man in America 
in process of shipwreck against the inbred and tenacious 
prejudices of a pair of domestics has both its comic and 
its instructive side. In a difference of opinion with the 
world at large, Emerson could be calmly sure of eventual 
mastery; the case was otherwise with cook and Louisa. 
He accepted his defeat meekly, and, it is to be feared, 
with thankfulness. 

The Alcott project was an invitation to that family 
to share in the Emerson house growing out of the 
owner's uneasy sense that he occupied more room than 
his needs required or his principles approved. Here, 
again, the Emersons profited by that reenforcement 
of common sense which years of domestication with a 
visionary are prone to induce in a clear-sighted woman: 
Mrs. Alcott 's refusal was unshakable. 

These attempts, to which failure imparts a mislead- 
ing aspect of childishness, could not be spared from the 
Emersonian record; they are gauges of sincerity. 

The birth of Emerson's first daughter and second 
child, Ellen, occurred on February 25, 1839. The fol- 
lowing is part of the entry in the "Journals": — 
-» "Yesterday morning, M February at 8 o'clock, a 



"FULL CIRCLE" 109 

daughter was born to me, a soft, quiet, swarthy little 
creature, apparently perfect and healthy. My sacred 
child! Blessings on thy head, little winter bud! And 
comest thou to try thy luck in this world, and know if 
the things of God are things for thee? Well assured, and 
very soft and still, the little maiden expresses great con- 
tentment with all she finds, and her delicate but fixed 
determination to stay where she is, and grow." 

It is pleasant once more to come upon this shy and 
respectful paternity, the mixture of vision and sturdy 
actuality which the child wears to his thought, and to 
note the tender and timid firmness with which he grasps 
the facts almost as the father might hold the babe 
itself. 

The second daughter, Edith, was born November 22, 
1841. Two months later, on January 28, 1842, the 
"Journals" contain this movingly brief entry: "Yes- 
terday night, at fifteen minutes after eight, my little 
Waldo ended his life." 

So peculiar was the impression made by this boy upon 
the family and their friends and, through their meagre 
outgivings, upon the public at large, that his death even 
now can hardly be read or recorded by distant strangers 
without a sense of heartbreak. One cannot recall an- 
other death at five years of which the mere record has 
induced a sense of bereavement so widespread and so 
acute. Emerson calls him in a single searching epithet 
"the deep-eyed boy," and again "a boy of early wisdom, 
of a grave and even majestic deportment, of a perfect 
gentleness"; and he writes to Carlyle: "A promise like 
that Boy's I shall never see." The child had possessed 



110 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

himself of the hearts of less partial judges; the grave 
Elizabeth Hoar had met him with "plain and wise love," 
Thoreau had been his playfellow, and the remem- 
brance of his promise shot a troubled ray through the 
torn soul of Margaret Fuller in her stormy exile. 

The boy had been admitted to a large share of his 
father's companionship even in the hours and places 
consecrated to study, and that dainty wooing of his 
children, which went hand-in-hand with the capacity to 
view them at other times from an inter-stellar distance, 
checkered the day with bright episodes. "I like my 
boy," says Emerson, with the candor with which an 
honest man admits his eccentricities, — "I hke my 
boy, with his endless, sweet soHloquies and iterations." 
"I love the dear children and miss their prattle," he 
writes, to his wife from Nantasket Beach, with the same 
air of the startled psychologist. He says in another 
letter, with a winning sense of parental responsibility: 
"In the pocket of the coat I will put a pebble from the 
beach for Waldo." He is bewitched by the children's 
grammar (he wished even grammar to be "spontane- 
ous"). In the grave pages of the "Journals," among 
his weightiest and profoundest meditations, anecdotes 
of the children's words and acts are inserted here and 
there hke poppies in the corn. 

These records, as they stand in the "Journals," are 
affecting; transferred to other pages, they would seem 
puerile. Two or three, however, may be retained with- 
out indecorum by the austere biographer. Waldo's say- 
ing to his father, "I wish you would not dig your leg," 
is almost a classic, and became a proverb or byword 



"FULL CIRCLE" 111 

in the domestic circle. "When Dr. Jackson smoked a 
cigar, Waldo said: *See the cobwebs come out of the 
gentleman's mouth.'" Emerson Uked the proof of re- 
finement ojffered by Waldo at the circus (to which he 
went under the guidance of the author of "The Over- 
Soul") when he watched the clown: "Papa, the funny- 
man makes me want to go home." The boy's dehcacy 
is perhaps more decisively evinced in the remark: "The 
flowers talk when the wind blows over them." The fol- 
lowing entry may be excusably transcribed if only for 
the whimsical collocation of dates which places it in 
the "Journal" on the day after the famous Divin- 
ity School Address: "Little Waldo cheers the whole 
house by his mooing calls to the cat, to the birds, to the 
flies, — * Pussy-cat, come see Waddow! Liddle Birdy, 
come see Waddow! Fies! Fies! come see Waddow!'" 

The boy seems to have been neither morbid nor over- 
strung: the parents would appear to have displayed 
a sanity that was commendable in idolaters. Emerson 
speaks of "a perfect health and as happy a life ... as 
ever child enjoyed"; and observes, in another place, 
that "the boy had his full swing." His virtue seems to 
have had its sanative limitations. His father mentions: 
"Waldo's diplomacy in giving account of Ellen's loud 
cries declares that she put her foot into his sandhouse 
and got pushed." It is also recorded that at an early 
age he found the hair of his little cousin "divine to 
pull." 

The grief of Emerson for the child's death was un- 
utterable. The letter to Carlyle is a moan. The "Jour- 
nal" record two days after the death presents a picture 



in RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



^! 



of ravage and desolation almost more ajffecting than 
its later embodiment in the heart-piercing verse of the 
"Threnody." Two years afterwards he writes: "I have 
had no experience, no progress, to put me into a better 
intelHgence with my calamity than when it was new." 
On his deathbed, he smiled, and said, "Oh, that beauti^ 
ful boy!" Against this must be set certain curious and 
chilhng remarks in the essay on "Experience," in which 
with express reference to his son's death he hardily de- 
clares: "The only thing grief has taught me is to know 
Low shallow it is." Later, he affirms, with pitiless candor, 
that "this calamity . . . falls off from me and leaves 
no scar" (the italics are ours). In comment on these 
assertions which must neither be put aside nor over- 
valued, it may be observed that Emerson's eye is here 
fixed on the soul within the soul, the core of the spiritual 
life; that he had many moods whose fashion it was to 
cut each other's acquaintance; that there is a form of 
partial dishonesty which is produced by an excess of de- 
votion to candor; that a parade of hardness may have 
seemed to him a wholesome counterpoise to the fashion- 
able parade of sensibiHty. That Waldo's death wrought 
no change in the form of his inner life is probably quite 
true; his two great passions, so far as we can judge, 
were his love for Ellen Tucker and his grief for his son; 
neither left any recognizable mark on his philosophy 
or the method of his contemplations. 

If his grief could not unseat his philosophy, it is 
equally certain that his philosophy did not displace his 
grief. The problem had its grave moral interest. Re- 
ligion, under various dispensations, had acted as a 



"FULL CIRCLE" 113 

tonic to sufferers, but never as an anaesthetic. In Emer- 
son religion had been raised to an almost unheard-of 
power. Would that power counteract the ordinary 
human feehngs in calamity? The answer was a plain 
negative. Emerson's religion quite failed to perform the 
office, and though most people would like the religion 
and its possessor all the more on account of the failure, 
the importance of the fact must not be overlooked. 
Rehgion confines its protectorship to its own estates, 
that is, to the parts of life which it rules; when the saint 
becomes a father, the fatherhood does not become a 
sharer in the inviolability of the saintship. 

The letter to Carlyle which announces the death of 
the son opens with the following sentences: — 

"My dear Friend, — I enclose a bill of exchange for 
forty-eight pounds sterling, payable by Baring Brothers 
and Co. after sixty days from the 25th of February. 

"This sum is part of a payment from Little and 
Brown on accoimt of sales of your London French Rev- 
olution and of Chartism.'' 

Business matter of this kind consumes many para- 
graphs in the earlier letters of Carlyle and Emerson; 
indeed, it may be doubted whether dollars and pounds 
sterling ever before chinked so persistently in the cor- 
respondence of two philosophers. Emerson had pro- 
posed and superintended the issue of the "French 
Revolution," the "Miscellanies" (in four volumes), 
and "Chartism" by willing but cautious and delaying 
American pubhshers. The "astonishing enclosures" 
from the "surprising man" were subjects of wonder, 
even of tears on one occasion, in the little household 



114 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

in Cheyne Row whose poverty dishonored England. 
These exertions in behalf of Carlyle, continued for years 
with the utmost fidehty, humility, and amenity, are 
perhaps the highest proof offered by Emerson of the 
rarity of his disinterestedness. Large and immediate 
sacrifices half repay us by the inspiration of their large- 
ness, half console us by the rapidity of their passage : the 
real test comes in the performance of services, which 
are at once unending and discontinuous, in which the 
footings are large while the items are trivial. Emerson, 
a man to whom his time was his freehold, patiently sub- 
mitted for years to the invasion and overrunning of that 
estate by petty, uncongenial, mercantile negotiations 
with their fated accompaniments of delay, disappoint- 
ment, and cross-purposes. A mere trifle such as the 
advance of money from his own pocket is treated by 
the reader with a negligence which implies the culmina- 
tion of homage. 

The first volume of "Essays " was published in March, 
1841, by James Munroe and Company, of Boston. A 
second series followed in 1844. The first volume of his 
poems did not come out till 1847. 



CHAPTER III 

THE WESTERING WHEEL 

In the last part of the year 1846 Emerson received 
a letter from an English acquaintance, Mr. Alexander 
Ireland, who urged him to come to England and de- 
liver courses of lectures in response to invitations to 
be obtained from various organizations in the English 
counties. Mr. Ireland had been Emerson's guide in 
Edinburgh in 1833, and united the practical gifts which 
made him "the king of all friends and helpful agents" 
with a "sweetness and bonhomie'' that convinced Emer- 
son that "a pool of honey" lay "about his heart." The 
invitation found the lecturer in one of those moods of 
suspense and stagnation incidental to men who depend 
on stimuli which they cannot control. Emerson had, 
as he says, " a good deal of domestic immoveableness — 
being fastened down by wife and children, by books and 
studies, by pear trees and apple trees," but his need, 
in his homely phrase, of "a whip for his top," seconded 
by importunities from Mr. Ireland and impulsions from 
his wife, proved more than a counter-weight to his 
objections. His name was known in England to an 
extent that surprises those who realize the slowness with 
which it was traversing America. AppUcations for lec- 
tures "flowed in" to the rejoicing Mr. Ireland, and 
Emerson's time had to be safeguarded by refusals. 

"So," says Emerson, "I took my berth in the packet- 



116 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

ship Washington Irving and sailed from Boston on 
Tuesday, 5th October, 1847/' On the 22d of October, 
he reached Liverpool, and five days afterward, wrote 
to his wife from London. 

"Dear Lidian: ... I found at Liverpool after a couple 
of days a letter which had been once there seeking me 
(and once returned to Manchester before it reached my 
hands) from Carlyle addressed to *R. W. E. on the 
instant he lands in England,' conveying so hearty a 
welcome and so urgent an invitation to house and hearth 
that I could no more resist than I could gravitation; 
and finding that I should not be wanted for a week in 
the lecture-rooms, I came hither on Monday, and, at 
ten at night, the door was opened to me by Jane Carlyle, 
and the man himself was behind her with a lamp in the 
entry. They were very little changed from their old 
selves of fourteen years ago (in August), when I left 
them at Craigenputtock. *Well,* said Carlyle, *here 
we are, shovelled together again.' The floodgates of his 
talk are quickly opened, and the river is a great and 
constant stream. We had large communication that 
night until nearly one o'clock, and at breakfast next 
morning it began again. At noon or later, we went to- 
gether, Carlyle and I, to Hyde Park and the palaces 
(about two miles from here), to the National Gallery, 
and to the Strand, — Carlyle melting down all West- 
minster and London into his talk and laughter as he 
walked. . . . An immense talker he is, and altogether as 
extraordinary in his conversation as in his writing. . . . 
Carlyle and his wife live on beautiful term^. Nothing 
can be more engaging than their ways." 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 117 

One feels that the cherished doctrine of the "fatality " 
of perceptions is somewhat discredited by this felicitous 
mistake. 

Another brief passage on Carlyle must be set down. 
"His sneers and scoffs are thrown in every direction. 
He breaks every sentence with a scoffing laugh, — 
* windbag/ 'monkey,' 'donkey,' 'bladder'; and let him 
describe whom he will, it is always * poor fellow.' I said, 
*What a fine fellow are you to bespatter the whole 
world with this oil of vitriol!' 'No man,' he replied, 
'speaks truth to me.'" 

Emerson's lecture courses in the provinces, which 
occupied the months of November and December, were 
received with a favor which indicates either a rare 
imderstanding on the part of provincial citizenship in 
England or a faculty — still more rare and still less Eng- 
lish — of deriving pleasure from the unintelligible. His 
first course, delivered before the members of the Man- 
chester Athenaeum, comprised some of the lectures later 
printed in "Representative Men." The next series, 
given in the Manchester Mechanics' Institution, in- 
cluded "Eloquence," "Domestic Life," "Reading," and 
"The Superlative in Manners and Literature." In 
December, lectures were read in Derby, Sheffield, Not- 
tingham, Birmingham, Preston, Leicester, Chesterfield, 
and Worcester, — names blank enough in the distant 
recital, but each touched, in its own hour, with the glow 
of novelty. The fulness with which the lectures were 
reported in Manchester became an embarrassment to 
Emerson, who was too sensitive or too scrupulous to 
wish to repeat discourses already offered to the public 



118 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

in abridged form through the columns of the news- 
papers. 

The tone of the newspaper critiques may be inferred 
from citations given in Moncure D. Conway's volume. 
Some extracts revel in those valueless superlatives which 
merely show that a roaming love of hyperbole has found 
a new bivouac, but the praise in others has the partial 
indecisiveness which attests sincerity. The doubter is 
sometimes gradually convinced, and the very indiffer- 
ence and carelessness of deHvery which was first cited 
in censure is later converted into a grace. The follow- 
ing sketch of physique, at the end of an effusive para- 
graph, is almost disconcerting in the rudeness of its 
objectivity: "He is a thin, tall man, apparently about 
forty-five, with an oval Yankee countenance, rather sal- 
low and emaciated, and a very prominent WeUington 
nose." The extracts as a whole confirm the impression 
that Emerson's quality was far more apprehensible than 
his intelUgence, and that this quahty was more appre- 
ciable in his person and his voice than in the bulk of his 
published writings. 

On his lecturing trips in America, it was Emerson's 
practice to reject private hospitahty, and to seek in- 
dependence, if not comfort, at the hotel. In England, he 
writes to his wife: "I find many kind friends and have 
given up my caprice of not going to private houses, and 
scarcely go to any other. At Nottingham, I was the 
guest, on four nights, of four different friends." He finds 
everywhere "the same profuse kindness." 

Emerson appears to have been the best, though pos- 
sibly not the most assiduous or the most talkative, of 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 119 

sight-seers. It may be doubted whether an equal 
wealth and variety of material had ever before been 
presented to a curiosity so capacious and, in its own 
fashion, so deep. The mind of this scholar-mystic had 
matured to a point where suggestiveness was universal. 
The items in the "Journals" are curiously diverse. In 
Worcester, it is the cathedral that attracts; at Leeds 
and Bradford, it is the black sheep; at Halifax, it is car- 
pet mills offering vistas Uke church aisles; at Birming- 
ham it is a milk-cart drawn by two dogs; at Bridhng- 
ton (presumably) it is a young man with a skin of hard 
scales hke an armadillo; in Edinburgh, it is De Quincey; 
in London it is a Chartist meeting, or a lecture by Rich- 
ard Owen with his powerful face and surgical smile, or 
a bon-mot of Sydney Smith's about a giraffe with two 
yards of sore throat; at Oxford it is a manuscript of 
Plato bearing date a.d. 896. No doubt this power to be\ 
sincerely interested in many things helps to explain the 
surprising facility with which this reserved American 
with his modest fame made his way into all circles, in- 
cluding the highest social life : good auditors never lack 
opportunities for the display of their accomplishment. 
There is one passage in a letter to Mrs. Emerson, 
written at Manchester, which must be quoted both for 
its intrinsic interest and for the substantial comfort it 
affords to people who doubt whether Emerson showed 
the normal interest of good men in the physical misery 
of strangers: "My dearest little Edie, to tell you the 
truth, costs me many a penny day by day. I cannot go 
up the street but I shall see some woman in rags, with a 
little creature just of Edie's size and age, but in coarsest 



120 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



^1 



ragged clothes and barefooted, stepping beside her; and 
I look curiously into her Edie's face, with some terror 
lest it should resemble mine, and the far-off Edie wins 
from me the halfpence for this near one. Bid Ellen and 
Edie thank God they were born in New England, and 
bid them speak the truth, and do the right forever and 
ever, and I hope they and theirs will not stand bare- 
footed in the mud on a bridge in the rain to beg of pas- 
sengers." That the charitable act is quasi-parental, and 
is viewed, in a way, as a payment of accident insurance, 
does not prevent the passage from ranking among the 
loveliest and most endearing of Emerson's self-unfold- 
ings. 

The references to the children in the correspondence 
of these months are warm and tender: they even show 
signs of a progressing intimacy. *'Love to all the dar- 
lings at home, whom I daily and nightly behold." 
"Many kisses, many blessings, to the little and the 
least." "All these touching anecdotes and now draw- 
ings and letters of my darlings duly come, and to my 
great joy." 

He is often tempted "to run ignominiously away from 
Britain and France" to see his children again. It is a 
point well worth noting in these home letters that Em- 
erson, whose impatience of any emphasis on the material 
side of hospitality is often manifested, is urgent, almost 
pathetic, in his petition to his wife that a young English- 
man who may visit Concord in the winter shall find a 
fire in his bedchamber, and be served duly with bread 
and wine at 9 or 10 p.m. 

In February, 1848, Emerson read lectures in Glasgow 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 121 

and Edinburgh. In the latter town he met De Quincey, 
a gentle, entreating figure, not destined to fulfil his hope 
of seeing something on the scale of York Minster, and 
John Wilson (Christopher North), whose lectures as 
Emerson declares, with his ineffable tranquiUity, "have 
really no merit." He was introduced to Francis Jeffrey, 
whose inadequacy is politely suggested, and to other 
personages of the day whose names have lost their 
resonance. The air of indulgence toward literary men 
in Emerson's letters and journals of the time contrasts 
oddly with the earnest receptiveness of his attitude 
toward the men — and the facts — of science. He had 
left behind the young man of 1833-34 for whom a 
few refulgent literary personalities had constituted the 
worth of Europe. In his present phase literature is 
almost ranked with aristocracy among powers whose 
virtue is chiefly emblematic. At Edinburgh he sat to 
David Scott, the painter, "a sincere great man," whose 
likeness of Emerson either suffers greatly in the repro- 
duction or requires the trained eye for its proper valua- 
tion. On his way to London, he spent an hour and a 
haK with Wordsworth, whose table-talk he disparages 
by undertaking to furnish as good himself; on which it 
may be remarked that the test of inadequacy here of- 
fered is not wholly conclusive; that Wordsworth was 
nearly seventy-eight years old, and that Emerson's de- 
mand for amusement was in its way as imperative as 
that of a Parisian beauty. 

He arrived in London on March 1, and took lodgings 
with his English pubHsher, John Chapman, in a house 
afterwards distinguished by the occupancy of George 



122 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Eliot. Carlyle, Richard Milnes, and the American 
Minister, Mr. Bancroft, were prodigal of introductions, 
and we have an EngKshman's own testimony to the fact 
that Emerson "took place at once as one of the con- 
spicuous figures of the London season." London, too 
avid of diversion not to be tolerant of peculiarity — 
even the pecuharity of modesty — opened its jealous 
and exclusive doors to the half -known New Englander 
for whom Carlyle was voucher. In such circles Emerson 
could not be facile, but he had, we should infer, a cer- 
tain address in the right use and proper limitation of his 
very maladjustments, and he seems to have been neither 
unhappy nor unvalued. With his proneness to exag- 
gerate his disabilities, he had written to his wife from 
Manchester: "You must not think that any change has 
come over me, and that my awkward and porcupine 
manners are ameliorated by English air"; and he writes 
again from London: "Pray, after this ostentation of my 
fashionable acquaintance, do you believe that my rustici- 
ties are smoothed down, and my bad manners mended? 
Not in the smallest degree." 

Emerson, of course, could not measure the eiffect of 
his face and voice in making way for him in high-bred 
companiesj in fiUing blanks, and in excusing shortages. 
The sentiment expressed by the diarist, Crabb Robin- 
son, was probably not exceptional: "It was with a feel- 
ing of predetermined dislike that I had the curiosity 
to look at Emerson at Lord Northampton's a fortnight 
ago; when, in an instant, all my dislike vanished. He 
has one of the most interesting countenances I ever be- 
held — a combination of intelligence and sweetness that 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 123 

quite disarmed me." When the Barings gave a dinner 
in Emerson's honor, Carlyle bluntly records that "no- 
body minded him much"; but Emerson, we may guess, 
did not mind the not being minded, and the Barings 
could probably distinguish between that assimilative — 
shall we say pasturing? — silence of Emerson and the 
dumbness of discomfort and aUenation. 

From the excellent letters to his wife which brighten 
many pages of Mr. Cabot's "Memoir," we snatch a few 
threads here and there. He found Milnes "made of 
sugar"; he heard at the Geological Society the best de- 
bate he had come upon in England; he was elected to the 
Athenaeum Club; he saw Macready as Lear and Mrs. 
Butler (Fanny Kemble) as CordeHa; he watched the 
handsome and courteous Prince Albert with that pass- 
ing condescension to royalty which is excusable even 
in a sage; he notes, with some particularity, the good 
looks of the women; he found in Lady Morgan "a sort 
of fashionable or London edition of Aunt Mary"; he 
saw Rothschild "in flesh and blood"; he was delighted 
with the talk of Sir Charles Fellowes, who brought 
home the Lycian marbles; he found Fronde (at Exeter 
College, Oxford) "a noble youth, to whom my heart 
warms"; he dined with Dickens, at Forster's, and for- 
got himself to the extent of liking the author of the 
"poor Pickwick stuff" very well. With the social — 
or unsocial — Tennyson (a man as to whose writings 
he could not keep his opinion stationary) he was "con- 
tented at once." He noted the "quiet, sluggish sense 
and strength" (the italics are ours), and found him a 
Hawthorne with less shyness and more fluency. He 



124 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

found in Leigh Hunt manners surpassed only by De 
Quincey's; in Maeaulay a "wonderful vivacity," mean- 
ing, as it would seem, vigor or life; in George Eliot, then 
undistinguished, "a calm, clear spirit." 

The dynastic changes of 1848 in France, which had 
thrown London and all Europe into sympathetic or ap- 
prehensive perturbation, did not prevent Emerson from 
crossing the Channel or interfere in an appreciable de- 
gree with the serenity of his twenty-five days (May 
6-31) of reflective observation in that city. On May 
15, within twenty-four hours, he saw the birth and de- 
cease of an attempted revolution. He had praised the 
Enghsh all the winter, with compensatory disparage- 
ment of France, but the French rose fast in his esteem 
during his sojourn in Paris. He Hked the courtesy, the 
trimness or trigness of the very gamins, the invitations 
to entertainment which made all Paris seem a continu- 
ation of the theatre, the variety of solicitations to the 
eye; in short, he is thankful for Paris (the Paris of 1848) 
as a beneficent anodyne or anaesthetic which the charity 
of destiny had provided as a lenitive to possible calami- 
ties. This choice of the Msenad or Valkyrie as sick- 
nurse is indicative of the fearlessness of the patient. 

He was open, however, to an opposite cast of impres- 
sions. At the clubs he found the men "in terrible ear- 
nest." Again he writes : "The deep sincerity of the speak- 
ers, who are agitating social, not political, questions, and 
who are studying how to secure a fair share of bread 
to every man, and to get God's justice done through 
the land, is very good to hear." The "Journals" con- 
tain this shrewd epigram, called forth by the spread of 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 125 

thought among the democrats: "The most important 
word the Age has given to the vocabulary is 'Blouse.'" 

On May 13, without reference to Paris, he sets down 
this passage, remarkable for the haughtiness of its re- 
coil and for the deep bell-stroke whose muffled peal is 
audible in the concluding sentences : — 

"What can the brave and strong genius of C. himself 
avail? What can his praise, what can his blame, avail 
me, when I know that if I fall or if I rise, there still 
awaits me the inevitable joke? The day's Enghshman 
must have his joke, as duly as his bread. God grant me 
the noble companions whom I have left at home who 
value merriment less, and virtues and powers more. If 
the English people have owed to their House of Com- 
mons this damnable derision, I think they have paid an 
over-price for their hberties and empire. But when I 
balance the attractions of good and evil, when I con- 
sider what facilities, what talents a Kttle vice would 
furnish, then rise before me not these laughers, but the 
dear and comely forms of honour and genius and piety 
in my distant home, and they touch me with chaste 
palms moist and cold, and say to me. You are ours." 

Our earHest acquisitions are those of which the ap- 
preciation is tardiest, and this passage indicates that 
Emerson in mature life came to value more and more 
those local and ancestral impregnations which, in the 
first warmth of his revolt from tradition, he had al- 
lowed himseK imduly to depreciate. Boston had taught 
him to be cosmopolite; the world was now converting, 
him into a Bostonian. 

Before leaving London, Emerson had slowly and un- 




126 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

willingly brought himself to consent to the delivery of 
six lectures on his return to that city; he had been 
"much pressed, and came at last to have a feehng that 
not to do it was a kind of skulking." The course was 
given in June, 1848, at the Portman Square Literary 
and Scientific Institution, and comprised the following 
titles: I. Powers and Laws of Thought; II. Relation of 
Intellect to Natural Science; III. Tendencies and Duties 
of Men of Thought; IV. PoHtics and Socialism; V. Po- 
etry and Eloquence; VI. Natural Aristocracy. The ap- 
palling dulness of these titles — to say nothing of the 
engrossment with French affairs — half excuses the 
failure of London to avail itself largely of this oppor- 
tunity, and the promised two hundred pounds of profit 
to the lectxu-er shrank to a scant eighty pounds in the 
sequel. The company, however, grew larger each day, 
and was starred with notabihties, titled and literary: the 
Duchess of Sutherland, the Duke of Argyle, Carlyle, and 
Barry Cornwall. "Carlyle, too," says Emerson, "makes 
loud Scottish-Covenanter gruntings of laudation, or at 
least of consideration when anything strikes him, to the 
edifying of the attentive vicinity." A single eloquent, 
almost a pathetic, adverb assures us that "Jane Carlyle 
and Mrs. Bancroft honestly came." "The high price 
of the tickets," as Dr. Garnett says, "caused Emerson 
to be taxed with forsaking the middle class"; and he 
cleared himself of tuft-himting or pound-himting by 
delivering three "expiatory" lectures, at democratic 
prices, in Exeter Hall. The Duchess of Sutherland and 
other titled persons invited him to their houses, and 
showed a good sense and good nature which made 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 127 

coronets forgivable. Their relation to Emerson pre- 
sented the rare case of an aristocracy valued by a man 
of thought for intrinsic merit. 

What effect has the season of familiar intercourse pro- 
duced upon that peculiar Carlyle-Emerson relation, in 
which distance had powerfully aided two men to keep 
near to each other.? To speak first of Jane Carlyle, whose 
"honest" comings to Portman Square were so affec- 
tionately chronicled. She had learned in less than three 
months to speak slightingly of Emerson, — an art in 
which her progress was proverbially rapid; she had foimd 
out that Emerson had no ideas (except mad ones) that 
he had not got out of Carlyle. She appears to have had 
some difficulty in forgiving an inadvertence of destiny 
which had involved an unexpected half-hour's tete-a- 
tete with her American friend. Carlyle, too, has his dis- 
enchanting candors. "We had immense talking with 
him here, but found he did not give us much to chew the 
cud upon — found, in fact, that he came with the rake 
rather than the shovel. He is a pure high-minded man, 
but I think his talent is not quite so high as I had anti- 
cipated." A little later comes the following commen- 
tary: "very exotic; of smaller dimensions, too, and dif- 
fered much from me as a gymnosophist sitting idle on a 
flowery bank may do from a wearied worker and wrestler 
passing that way with many of his bones broken. Good 
of him I could get none, except from his friendly looks 
and elevated exotic polite ways, and he would not let 
me sit silent for a minute. Solitary, on that side, too, 
then? Be it so, if so it must be. But we will try a little 
farther." After parting, he relaxes his rigor a little. He 



128 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

even makes the princely concession of "some indis- 
putable natural faculty," which the American reader, 
glad by this time to see his countryman acquitted of 
imbecility, accepts in humble thankfulness. But the 
earlier valuation is not rescinded. 

These are chilling and disquieting records, but it 
would be neither generous nor wise to exaggerate their 
significance. The temperature at 5 Cheyne Row was 
noted for extremes. Almost everybody and everything 
that had committed the imprudence of being born in 
the same era with the Carlyles had its turn of deprecia- 
tion in that unsparing domicile, but the love and re- 
spect which could not inhibit these strictures had the 
strength sometimes to outlive them. Carlyle's letters 
to Emerson after the English visit show no abatement 
of sincerity and, if anything, an increase of regard; in- 
deed, from this time forward, the overtures and ur- 
gencies come mainly from Chelsea, and encounter, on 
Emerson's side, an evident slackening, not in cordiality, 
but in epistolary zeal. 

To Emerson, as we have already hinted, Carlyle had 
now almost laid aside the prophet and taken on the 
aspect of a Niagara or Vesuvius, a great reservoir of tur- 
bulent primitive force. Emerson liked power only less 
than insight, and the early affection he had formed for 
Carlyle survived the extinction of part at least of the 
grounds for its existence. He did not lose his intrepidity 
in the neighborhood of the Titan, rebuked him for en- 
couraging too abject a discipleship in a clever young 
Espinasse, and even aroused the lion in his friend by a 
hint of dissent on the sensitive topic of Cromwell. Their 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 129 

relation was well summarized by Carlyle in a letter 
written in 1850: "Though I see well enough what a great 
deep cleft divides us, in our ways of practically looking 
at this world, — I see also (as probably you do your- 
self ) where the rock-strata, miles deep, unite again: and 
the two souls are at one." 

Emerson sailed from Liverpool on July 15, and reached 
America before the end of the month; he found the road 
from Liverpool to New York "long, crooked, rough, 
rainy, and windy." The ten months had been packed 
with particolored life, with business, observation, and 
social intercourse; they had been animated perhaps 
rather than happy; he had sighed for his children, he had 
chafed at his work, he had felt no doubt the intensified 
solitude of the recluse in grand assembhes. But the rare 
opportunities for observation, the rare provocations to 
thought, had been grasped with an incomparable avidity. 
The harvest was garnered in "English Traits." 

The last decades of Emerson's life were punctuated by 
the appearance of rather short volumes at long inter- 
vals: "Representative Men," 1850; "Enghsh Traits," 
1856; "Conduct of Life," 1860; "Society and Solitude," 
1870; "Letters and Social Aims," 1875. A later chapter 
will deal critically with these volumes. 

Brief mention must be made of the "Massachusetts 
Quarterly Review," a periodical of high aims, insufficient 
basis, and brief life, to which Emerson contributed a 
prospectus and on whose covers his name was permitted 
to stand for a short time in the excellent company of 
Theodore Parker and J. E. Cabot. Even these strictly 



130 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

nominal services were concluded after the fourth num- 
ber, and the editorship was rehnquished, in form, as well 
as fact, to Theodore Parker. 

In the decade from 1850 to 1860, which saw the pre- 
paring and pubUshing of the works reviewed in the last 
chapter, Emerson passed from his forty-seventh to his 
fifty-seventh year. Of the three children, Ellen in the 
same period, grew from eleven to twenty-one years, 
Edith from nine to nineteen, Edward, the youngest 
child and now the only son, from six to sixteen, facts 
better worth specifying than many matters whose dig- 
nity would be less subject to cavil. The quiet of his Con- 
cord home was broken only by lecture trips of enlarging 
circuit, of increased effort and hardship, but of compen- 
sating variety and instructiveness, carried out with a 
characteristic mixture of fortitude and impatience. The 
obligation to lecture was peremptory, as he was cramped 
in money matters by an unfortunate investment in 
Vermont railroad stock which afforded no dividends. 
The barn door is neatly shut in the following caustic 
sentence: "I took such pains not to keep my money in 
the house, but to put it out of the reach of burglars by 
buying stock, and had no guess that I was putting it into 
the hands of these very burglars now grown wiser and 
standing dressed as Railway Directors." 

Emerson's mother, who had long lived in his house, 
the object of that tender fealty which was his fashion of 
domestic love, died peacefully in 1853. 

The specific point of interest in this period, however, 
is the maturing of his hostility to slavery, a phase of his 
career for which his lovers are perennially grateful. Not 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 131 

his life precisely, but the effect of his life, is completed 
by this development. To make the refutation of the 
charge of lotos-eating or dilettantism conclusive, to 
crown and sohdify the demonstration of his manhood, it 
was necessary that on the great moral struggle which 
rent America in his hf etime, the stand of her noblest son 
should be decisive and emphatic. Less than this might 
have doubtfully suflficed for sedulous students and un- 
questioning admirers, but not for the satisfaction of an 
exigent and suspicious world. As the case now stands, 
we are not constrained to accept a mere paper currency 
on the assurance of its convertibiHty into gold at some 
unspecified time and place: we are paid in actual bright 
doubloons and louis d'or that ring cheerily upon the 
counter. 

The situation is the more interesting that Emerson's 
deterrents from activity were almost as powerful as his 
incentives, and that a modest change in the course of 
American history might have confirmed him in the rel- 
atively passive attitude he had maintained from 1825 
to 1850. It is with a certain dramatic tension that we 
watch the gradual drifting of the boat from the languor 
of the side channel into the speed and vehemence of the 
middle current. 

Emerson's power of indignation at a public wrong had 
been put beyond question in 1838 by the private letter 
he addressed to Martin Van Buren, then President of the 
United States, in protest against the expulsion of the 
Cherokees from their lands under the alleged warrant 
of a fraudulent treaty. This letter is perhaps the most 
remarkable illustration of the wrath of the meek, of the 



132 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



1 



imperiousness of the humble, to be found in the annals 
of politics or of literature. Careful in the main of out- 
ward forms, it abandons itself in essentials to the stress 
of a passion and a daring of which, in a quiet mystic like 
Emerson, the fact alone could have revealed the possi- 
biKty. There are sentences hke levin-bolts that kindle 
where they smite. "The soul of man, the justice, the 
mercy that is the heart's heart in all men, from Maine to 
Texas, does abhor this business." "How could we call 
the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our 
government, or the land that was cursed by their parting 
and dying imprecations our country, any more.^ You, 
sir, will bring down that renowned chair in which you 
sit into infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of 
perfidy : and the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet 
omen of rehgion and liberty, will stink to the world." 

The crash of these words, the peals from this hidden 
Sinai, are as heartening and vivifying as they are for- 
midable. It will be noted that the terror and pity cen- 
tre about the United States rather than the wronged 
Cherokees. In Emerson's view, there was a victim in 
every act of crime, but he assigned that post to the 
criminal, not the sufferer. 

Emerson, in his brief pastorate, in 1830-31, twice 
permitted abohtionists to lecture or preach in the Sec- 
ond Church. In 1837, he deHvered, by request, in the 
Second Church at Concord, an anti-slavery lecture of an 
irritating mildness. He disliked the negro; he dishked 
the abohtionist; and, between these two dislikes, his 
condemnation of the planter, though sincere, lost much 
of its incisiveness. He suspected that slavery was 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 133 

symptomatic, and that abolition was a treatment of the 
symptoms. He thought that the essence of slavery was 
reproduced wherever one man — an aboHtionist very 
possibly — utiKzed the hard labor of another to secure 
leisure or luxury to himself. In 1845, he had urged his 
fellow-curators of the Concord Lyceum to invite Wen- 
dell Philhps to address the citizens on slavery. In the 
same year, he served on the committee which ex- 
pressed the opinion of Massachusetts on the expul- 
sion of Samuel Hoar from South Carolina in rather 
mildly disapproving resolutions. He roused himself 
with some difficulty to a tepid sense of the undesira- 
biKty of the annexation of Texas, the fate of Texas in- 
teresting him far less than the stand of Massachusetts. 
It was sometimes the mere cast of a die whether 
Emerson was to view such events with the dispassion- 
ate remoteness of the annahst and sociologist, view 
them as effects of historic necessity and as sources of 
undesigned benefits, or whether he should judge them 
by the motives of their perpetrators. In fact, he is al- 
most capable of approving the act and censuring the 
performer in the same breath.^ 

On August 1, 1844, he had deHvered in Concord a long 
address on the subject of the recently accomphshed 
emancipation of the negroes in the British West Indies. 
The address, reprinted in the "Miscellanies," is admir- 
able: rich in extended but always interesting narrative; 
revelling as might be foreseen in the opportunities for 
vivid concreteness with which the subject teemed; full 
of pity but sympathizing with the negro's joy almost 
1 See Cabot, n, 576-77. 



134 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

more than with his pain; of a homely simplicity, a fire- 
side tenderness, in parts; in parts, likewise, of a clarion- 
like resonance, if a clarion were adequate to suggest the 
brooding, thunderous undertones of the more exalted 
passages. But the point of immediate interest for us, 
the point which explains largely Emerson's previous 
backwardness or hesitating forwardness in the move- 
ment, is the immense encouragement he derives from 
the evidences of seK-help, of independent worth, sup- 
phed by Toussaint L'Ouverture and other negroes. Em- 
erson could tolerate slavery (in distant States) as long 
as slavery was the measure and definition of the negro's 
capacity, but any proof of the scantness of that measure, 
of the inaccuracy of that definition, was a summons to 
the forefront of the battle. 

Emerson had possessed even in youth a sparingly 
exercised but authentic faculty for fight, flicking, sweep- 
ing contempt, but the deeper and ampler note of pas- 
sionate scorn which invades his pages at this period is a 
trait hardly revealed before the glowing letter on the 
Cherokees. In 1846, he writes in the "Journals": — 

"If I were a member of the Massachusetts Legisla- 
ture, I should propose to exempt all colored citizens 
from taxation because of the inabifity of the Govern- 
ment to protect them by passport out of its territory. 
It does not give the value for which they pay the tax. 

"Also I should recommend that the executive wear 
no sword, and the oflSce of general be abolished and the 
whole militia disbanded; for if these persons do not 
know that they pretend to be and to do somewhat which 
they are not and do not, Hoar of Concord, Walker of 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 135 

the branded hand, Torrey the martyr, know that the 
sword of Massachusetts is a sword of lath or a turkey 
feather." 

On reflection, one is'not at all surprised that a cer- 
tain Archbishop Laud had some trouble with the man's 
ancestors. 

There are sharp words for South Carolina at this 
time, but on the whole Emerson's lenity toward the 
planter is conspicuous and consistent. His feeling for the 
Southerner, which dated back to his Harvard days, was 
a mixture, perhaps, of the esteem which he felt in 1848 
for the English nobility in its ancestral seats with the 
equally authentic relish awakened in him by the Cali- 
fornian rough and dare-devil of the same epoch. The 
two characters were not so far apart in Emerson's view, 
the gentleman holding to the bully the same relation 
that the stamped and minted coin, adapted to civil uses, 
holds to the raw nugget. It is far from surprising, there- 
fore, that the act which kindled his unappeasable wrath 
should have emanated not directly from the planters 
themselves but from the Government at Washington 
supported by Daniel Webster. Why was the Fugitive 
Slave Law of 1850 so detestable to a mind which had 
kept its equanimity in the presence of the fact of slavery 
and of the invasion of Mexico? Because it obliged the 
Northern man to catch slaves, because it was an inter- 
ference from without with Emerson's right, with any 
man's right, to obey his own conscience. It attacked the 
jurisdiction of the moral sentiment. It is doubtful if 
the shrewdest of Emerson's friends could have foreseen 
the energy of the reaction which this measure was to 



136 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

arouse in that serene and philosophic temper. "There is 
infamy in the air. I have a new experience. I wake in the 
morning with a painful sensation, which I carry about 
all day, and which, when traced home, is the odious 
remembrance of that ignominy which has fallen on 
Massachusetts, which robs the landscape of beauty, and 
takes the sunshine out of every hour." He goes on in 
the same address (delivered at Concord on May 3, 
1851) to define the Act of Congress of September 18, 
1850, as "a law which every one of you will break on the 
earliest occasion, — a law which no man can obey or 
abet the obeying without loss of respect and forfeiture 
of the name of a gentleman.'* 

This is fiery language for a reader of Plotinus. The 
Musketaquid is a peaceful stream, but it had its hour 
when its banks echoed to the crack of musketry. Bit- 
ter, even tragic, as the tone of the orator is, it is yet full 
of that sombre exhilaration which attends the muster- 
ing of great, half-unsuspected forces, in response to the 
bugle-call of some imperative occasion. Emerson is 
oppressed, no doubt, but something in him has been set 
free which owed to this crisis the possibility of freedom, 
and the emancipation tingles through all his veins like 
joy. He "frees his mind" no less surely in the loftier 
than in the vulgar sense. 

The slightness of government in Emerson's eyes, or, 
rather, his view that its sole hold on respectability lay in 
its adhesion to virtue, is brought out by the entire ab- 
sence of reluctance and of compunction in the counsels 
of disobedience which he sets forth. Away with hesita- 
tion, with squeamishness, with apology; disobedience 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 137 

is no painful necessity, no excusable license; it is duty, 
privilege, honor. Neither 1776 nor 1789 shall stay for a 
moment the visitation of justice on 1850. Here is a 
square issue for once between the state and the personal 
conscience, and the state is sent about its business like 
a footman who has been saucy to his master. In all of 
which the soul of the reader irrepressibly exults. 

A personal disillusion added its bitterness to the dif- 
ficulty of the crisis. For many years, since boyhood, 
indeed, Daniel Webster had been to Emerson a wonder, 
an inspiration, and — to re-apply a phrase of his own 
— a "delicious torment." The greatness of that man's 
constitution — the whole virtue of Webster may be 
designated in a double sense as constitutional — and the 
mediocrity of his aims, and even, by severe tests, of his 
intellect, gave stringent exercise to the mind of an 
admirer in whom strong loyalty and fatally clear per- 
ceptions contended with each other for predominance. 
From time to time he had felt constrained to re-try the 
case of Webster in his own mind, and the idolater in him 
had been heavily taxed to rescue his saint from the 
iconoclast. Webster himself is too often on the side of 
the assailants, but up to the fatal year 1850 Emerson 
had known how to subdue, if not to silence, his misgiv- 
ings; in 1843, when Webster was a guest at his house in 
Concord, his portrait is sketched with a tenderness that 
borders on solicitude. Having proved almost too labori- 
ously that Webster is "a very true and admirable man,'* 
he murmurs, under his breath as it were, "I only wish 
he would never truckle." 

No doubt this arrested or adjourned censure added 



138 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

its quantum to the splendors of that powerful invective 
with which he turned upon Webster after the recreancy 
of March, 1850. His description in 1843 of Webster's 
wrath might be transferred almost literally to his own : 
"His splendid wrath, when his eyes became fires, is as 
good to see, so intellectual it is,and the wrath of the fact 
and cause he espouses." The situation was curious. The 
prostration of Webster became the occasion for the tow- 
ering of the modest Emerson into hitherto undivined 
proportions. The remark, of course, applies only to his 
public capacities. Of Emerson, as of the different and 
inferior Swinburne, it may be affirmed that scorn and 
anger were needed to quicken their blood to that energy 
of flow which made them really sympathetic to average 
human nature. 

Emerson's remedy for the general situation was the 
purchase of the slaves from their masters, at a cost, 
possibly, of two thousand million dollars. The proposal 
as viewed by posterity has a sufficiently practical look, 
since it is clearly thriftier to pay once in gold than to 
pay twice, in gold and in blood. The difficulty in such 
a proposition lay, no doubt, in the fact that the will to 
buy and the will to sell were neither of them forthcom- 
ing except in the train of an emotional and moral ten- 
sion which would have made a mercantile settlement 
impracticable. 

The speech was repeated in several towns in support 
of Dr. Palfrey's candidacy for Congress, and at Cam- 
bridge the outbreak of "hisses, shouts, and cat-calls" 
interrupted, and finally stopped, the delivery. Professor 
James B. Thayer, in a note to Mr. Cabot, writes: "There 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 139 

never was a finer spectacle of dignity and composure 
than he presented. He stood with perfect quietness un- 
til the hubbub was over, and then went on with the next 
word. It was as if nothing had happened . . . and I cannot 
describe with what added weight the next words fell." 
At a later date, in Tremont Temple in 1861, he was again 
silenced by the mob, on which occasion he records in the 
"Journals" the following electrical sentence: "If I were 
dumb, yet I would have gone and mowed and muttered 
or made signs." 

Emerson had already hailed in John Brown the rise 
of a personage in whom the half-famished instinct of 
hero-worship, that persisted in his constitution, could 
find aliment if not repletion. John Brown afforded him 
not only the grateful spectacle of human nature dispens- 
ing with government and aiding itself, but that for 
which the scholar-mystic had vainly hungered all his 
days, the application of primitive power to disinterested 
ends. When Brown lay in prison after the collapse of 
the Virginia project, Emerson uttered these words (re- 
moved ten years later from the printed address) : "That 
new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was 
ever led by love of men into conflict and death — the 
new saint — awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he 
shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the 
cross." 

He welcomed the outbreak of war in 1861 with an 
enthusiasm which recalls the conduct of his grandfather, 
William Emerson, on the morning of the 19th of April, 
1775. "Now we have a country again." "Declared 
war is vastly safer than war undeclared." It is a fact 



140 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

worth considering that the actual presence of the deadly 
agencies did not modify but rather heightened his relish 
of the prospect. In the Charlestown Navy Yard, whither 
he had asked a friend to take him, "Sometimes," he 
said, "gunpowder smells good." Neither Bull Run nor 
GettysbiKg disturbed the constancy of this mood. It 
is interesting to note that the comments on war which 
checker the "Journals" of the next quadrennium are 
commonly favorable, even where the justice of the 
cause is not in question; and it is doubtful if its horrors 
touched or interested him except as they offered a back- 
ground to heroism. There is tremor rather of exultation 
than of grief in the words in which he describes the 
departure of the volimteers from Concord. The noble 
record of these Concord soldiers, for whose monument 
he gave the dedication address in 1867, touched him, to 
all appearance, very much as it stirred the heart of every 
generous son of Massachusetts. If there were a differ- 
ence, it was expressible in the phrase that Emerson was 
tender to the brave. The romantic impulse which had 
formed his love of Scott and fed his love of Shakespeare, 
and which, suppressed in other forms, found its main 
outlet in imagery, no doubt even in this mature age 
irradiated war with a courtly glamour. 

Meanwhile, the student and thinker in him was glad 
to have this baleful star brought within the range of 
his all-probing telescope. The prevalence of approval 
even in his passionless and deliberative hours is suffi- 
ciently remarkable. The war is a "great teacher,'* a 
"great reconciler," a "searcher of character," a "test of 
men"; it diffuses hardihood, it reverts to roots and foun- 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 141 

dations, it excludes other evils, it promotes organiza- 
tion, it unlocks munificence, it revives patriotism. He 
humors his good neighbors now and then by admitting 
cursorily that the war is "dreadful," but it is evident 
that the aroma of gunpowder is still titillative. Presi- 
dent Lincoln's conquest of his respect was gradual but 
sure, and his last doubts were dispelled by the Eman- 
cipation Proclamation. In January, 1862, he had gone 
to Washington to deliver an argument for emancipation 
before the Smithsonian Institution, and saw Lincoln, 
Seward, Chase, and other men of mark. The pinched, 
watchful, harassed temper of Washington, the half- 
shabby, half-forlorn aspect of men and things, is clearly 
imaged in the "Journal" of this visit, wherein facts are 
set down with a vivid plainness which attests the use- 
lessness of rhetoric. "The President impressed me more 
favorably than I had hoped"; in these days, when it 
was a question of Lincoln, New Englanders were clearly 
thankful for small mercies. There is some doubt as to 
whether the President attended the lecture at the Smith- 
sonian Institution, as asserted by Moncure D. Conway 
in his biography of Emerson. 

In Boston, in September, 1862, Emerson delivered an 
address on the "Emancipation Proclamation," which 
ranks high among his patriotic discourses. The throb 
in this speech is continuous and noble; its movement 
is singularly untrammelled; impulse, rejoicing, seem to 
be always pouring fresh energies into the restrained 
style. The vibrating phrase, "Do not let the dying die," 
of which the context alone can attest the magnificence, 
glorifies this impassioned speech. At another celebra- 



142 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

tion, on January 1, 1863, the famous "Boston Hymn" 

was read, the former advocate of purchase carrying all 

Boston with him in the famous outburst: — 

"Who is the owner? The slave is owner. 
And ever was. Pay him." 

The patriotic documents of this period, 1844-67, 
which included speeches on the Sumner outrage and on 
the death of Lincoln, are valuable as literature and simply 
priceless as testimony. They are remarkable for their 
exhibition of the qualities the absence of which in Emer^ 
son's prose is often lamented, — the qualities of freedom, 
continuity, perspective, and clearness; they are not 
wanting in his esoteric virtues. As Emerson's philo- 
sophical defect is the failure to allow suflSciently for the 
frailty of average flesh, so his literary defect is the fail- 
ure to allow sufficiently for the frailty of average intelli- 
gence. In narrative and in reasoning, which largely fill 
these addresses, he comes into closer relation ^ with his 
fellows. More Bostonian, more ancestral, less peculiar, 
less Emersonian, than in his other works, he has here 
supplied the counterpoise and hence the justification for 
his peculiarity. The whole series is an exemplar of the 
moral sublime. Passages quite as exalted aj?d much more 
spiritual are easily found in his other booKs, but in no 
other work is exaltation so happily combined with body. 
He is no longer content to make the air tingle; he makes 
the earth quake. 

The language of these speeches is sometimes unbridled, 
but there is a saving restraint in the tone which sustains 
the high decorum proper to the man. The god descends 
to share in the earthly conflict, but Olympus rides with 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 143 

him on his chariot. Never was a wrath so commanding, 
or so humble, as the wrath of Emerson. 

The war had been fruitful in pecuniary embarrass- 
ment: books, lectures, Mrs. Emerson's property in Ply- 
mouth, had alike ceased to yield the accustomed reve- 
nue. In all emergencies, however, his friends justified his 
trust. Mr. Abel Adams, an old friend and sterling man 
of business, whose advice on railway investments had 
been more kind than wise, repented his error as if it had 
been a fault, and wished to pay the Harvard College 
expenses of Emerson's young son, Edward. Even the 
sensitive philosopher, so shy of benefits that he found 
it a little hard to take gifts even from his own family, 
was obliged to yield to his friend's generous inflexibility. 
A lovable note (quoted in Mr. Cabot's "Memoir"), 
urging Mr. Adams's attendance at a high festival in the 
Emerson household, is one of those cherished guaranties 
of which the faithful reader, however convinced, never 
feels that he can have too many. 

The festival in question was the marriage of Emer- 
son's second daughter, Edith, in 1865, to Colonel William 
H. Forbes. The event was the cause of various satisfac- 
tions, compr'sing, in due time, the birth of a little grand- 
son, whose advent he welcomes in one of his gracious, 
priestlike, chiselled notes. Another benefit was the as- 
sumption by the efficient son-in-law of the charge of 
Emerson's pecuniary interests. Mr. Forbes released 
Emerson's property from the talons of a fraudulent 
agent whose "masterly and clear-headed statements of 
account" had consoled his employer for the paucity of 
dividends. Mr. Forbes not only disposed of this masterly 



144 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

accountant, but assumed the charge of the business 
arrangements with regard to Emerson's books. Under 
this happy stimulus, the books developed money-making 
propensities, which, their parentage considered, he felt 
to be almost indecent, and the augmenting receipts left 
him aghast at his own rapacity. 

A third happy consequence of this marriage was Emer- 
son's entrance into closer relations with John M. Forbes, 
the father of his son-in-law. This gentleman, whose 
merits, though very great, ran entirely along the con- 
ventional lines of efficiency, uprightness, and benevo- 
lence, drew from Emerson a eulogy which would scarcely 
have seemed grudging had its subject been Thoreau 
or Carlyle. Indeed, neither Thoreau nor Carlyle would 
have been permitted to escape without some gentle 
intimation of their share in the infirmity of manhood. 
Infirmities, however, become unthinkable in the society 
of Mr. Forbes. The date of this eulogy is October, 1864, 
and a great war teaches thinkers to respect men of ac- 
tion. More than this, Emerson seems, in his later days, 
to have gained a new fellowship with excellence of the 
recognized and normal type. The hours of insight, which 
had made all society an impertinence, had become rarer 
and less controllable as the years advanced, and the 
search in hours of intercourse for mystic illumination 
which had once drawn him to men like Alcott and Tho- 
reau had probably been checked by the infrequency 
of the successes. He lowered, no doubt, the plane of 
expectation, and found unexpected content in the fel- 
lowship and information he obtained on this lower level. 
At thirty, he would have regretted to find in Mr. 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 145 

Forbes an inadequate Transcendentalist; at sixty, he 
was glad to find in him a brave, kind, and sane man. 
"Never,*' he exclaims in his orchestral style, "was such 
force, good meaning, good sense, good action combined 
with such domestic lovely behavior, and such modesty 
and persistent preference of others." 

The change was aided possibly by a certain decrease 
in Emerson's dependence on mere beauty, and a height- 
ened ability to extract nutriment from plain facts, the 
facts which the everyday man commands and dispenses. 
Charles Eliot Norton, returning from Europe with Emer- 
son in 1873, writes thus: "Emerson was the greatest 
talker in the ship's company. He talked with all men, and 
yet was fresh and zealous for talk at night." On a trip 
to California, undertaken at the instance of the vigilant 
Mr. Forbes, he astonished his young companions by 
being "so agreeable all the time without getting tired." 
He seems clearly drawing closer to his kind. His increas- 
ing geniality was met halfway by their maturing rever- 
ence. Since 1850, he had had no fresh iconoclasms, and 
his old heresies, in politics and religion, were conquering 
and transforming his compatriots. Age itself is a kind 
of withdrawal, justifying the aloofness natural to his 
disposition, and the acknowledgment of the interval 
may have actually helped to shorten it. No person 
whose opinions are significant will conjecture for a mo- 
ment that Emerson had relinquished his old ideals: 
nothing had occurred but a shift of means, dependent 
in part upon altered capacity. 

In 1863, by appointment of President Lincoln, he 
served as visitor to the Academy at West Point; in which 



146 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

function Mr. John Burroughs, destined later to write 
one of the few memorable essays upon Emerson, mis- 
took him at first sight for an inquisitive farmer. In 1864 
he was a member of the School Committee in Concord. 
The singular evolution of mystic into committeeman 
and board member was completed by his election to the 
Board of Overseers of Harvard College. The same insti- 
tution conferred upon him the honorary title of LL.D. 
In 1865, he had delivered the commemoration address 
at Cambridge on the close of the war, and, in 1867, Phi 
Beta Kappa, after a recuperation of thirty years, felt 
warranted in inviting him for a second time to deliver 
the annual address. 

Conservatism, always slow to believe that its rebels 
are irreclaimable, reported at this time that Emerson 
had abjured his heterodoxies — an assertion which he 
authorized his son to contradict. The suggestion was 
foolish enough, but the comment with which Mr. Cabot 
qualifies his refutation deserves quoting: "What was 
true, I think, was that when his mind was quiescent, 
and nothing happened to stir up reflection, his feelings 
went back with complacency to the sentiments and the 
observances of his youth." To change the form of expla- 
nation slightly, Emerson had, in childhood and early 
manhood, classed certain high endowments — a religious 
spirit for example — with eyes and ears and lips and 
muscles as part of the universal, necessary, and in a 
sense negligible equipment of mankind, as things, in 
short, which man could hand over to the ordering of 
nature. Later on, probably, when he came to see that 
human nature and the religious spirit were separable 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 147 

entities, he set a rather higher value on the expedients 
mankind has devised for fostering their union; he saw 
merit in religious education. On one occasion, this feel- 
ing involved him in distinct opposition to his normal 
and proper attitude. When the Overseers of Harvard 
were requested to abolish the compulsory attendance at 
morning prayers in chapel, the division was so close 
that Emerson's affirmative vote, it is said, would have 
been decisive. He voted for compulsory attendance. 
The matter is not grave, but the incident is one which 
the true lover of Emerson can hardly read or recount 
without a tinge of melancholy. Though not a blot, it 
is a blur upon the clearness of his record. No wise man 
will question the nobihty of his motives; but, in this in- 
stance, the world had a right to more than impeccable 
motives from its great instructor in self-reliance; it had 
a right to a specific stand. 

For the last twenty years or so of his life Emerson was 
distinguished for the regularity of his attendance at the 
"Saturday Club," an organization of Boston notabili- 
ties, estabHshed in the late fifties, whose members dined 
together informally on the last Saturday of each month 
at the Parker House. This body, which included Long- 
fellow, Lowell, Holmes, Hawthorne, Motley, Agassiz, 
Sumner, and others, is said by Dr. Holmes to have clus- 
tered around Emerson as a nucleus — the last form which 
the seer's benefactions to his fellow-men could have been 
thought likely to adopt. Be that as it may, Emerson 
seems to have derived real enjoyment from his participa- 
tion in these dinners. That participation took the form 
of low-toned, measured, meditated speech and of a si- 



148 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

lence hardly less clear-cut. Emerson might be described 
as an eloquent listener, and his very presence was en- 
kindling. In improvised speeches, his success was rare, 
and Mr. Cabot tells of his rising at the "Saturday Club " 
on the occasion of the Shakespeare anniversary, "look- 
ing about him tranquilly for a minute or two, and then 
sitting down; serene and unabashed, but unable to say 
a word upon a subject so familiar to his thoughts from 
boyhood." 

Some time about the year 1870, word came to Emer- 
son of a London pubHsher's intention to bring out a vol- 
ume of his uncollected papers. At the intercession of 
the obhging Moncure D. Conway, the publisher aban- 
doned this project, in return for an engagement on Emer- 
son's part to prepare a similar collection, adding some 
new pieces, and consenting to its simultaneous issue 
in England and America. The work was slowly and 
laboriously advancing when, in the summer of 1872, the 
outbreak of fire in his dwelling-house at Concord re- 
sulted in the ruin of his house, the dispersion of his pa- 
pers, and the temporary derangement of his health. The 
zeal of friendly neighbors, aroused from sleep by his call 
at haK past five in the morning, saved furniture and 
books and the great bulk of his papers, but Emerson, 
who had walked about, partly dressed, in the rain, in 
the effort to collect papers, now Kterally fugitive, atoned 
for this rashness by an attack of fever. 

The doctrine of "Compensation" did not forget its 
defender. Several touching and agreeable incidents 
revealed the esteem in which Emerson was held by 
neighbors and remoter friends. A check for five thou- 



THE WESTERING WHEEL .149 

sand dollars was handed to Emerson by Francis Cabot 
Lowell a day or two after the fire, and, shortly after, a 
"friendly conspiracy," organized by Le Baron Russell, 
raised very readily another sum of eleven thousand six 
hxmdred and twenty dollars, and even succeeded in the 
much more delicate undertaking of inducing the grate- 
ful but sensitive Emerson to accept it. Judge Hoar, who 
was made the bearer of the bank check, understood the 
danger of carrying a spark into a powder-mill. He told 
Emerson "by way of prelude, that some of his friends 
had made him [Emerson] treasurer of an association who 
wished him to go to England and examine Warwick Cas- 
tle and other noted houses that had been recently injured 
by fire, in order to get the best ideas possible for restora- 
tion, and then apply them to a house which the asso- 
ciation was formed to restore in this neighborhood." 
Emerson "wondered" and "melted," and, in this state 
of Hquefaction, was unable to cope with the Jesuitry of 
Judge Hoar. The fire began to seem to him "more won- 
derful in its salvages than in its ruins," and the gift 
aroused "new aspirations in the old heart toward a 
better deserving." Even at sixty-nine he is wakened to 
new expectations of good from human intercourse — 
so stout was that ancient and often baffled hope of ideal 
companionship in this hardened lover of his kind. 

From the shock of this fire, Mr. Cabot dates the de- 
cline in memory and in mental grasp. Refreshment of 
some kind was clearly imperative, and, on October 24, 
1872, he embarked for England accompanied by his eld- 
est daughter, Ellen, the mainstay of his decKning years. 
They were met in London by the son Edward, then a 



150 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

student at St. Thomas's Hospital in that city. Emer- 
son met the aging and saddened Carlyle, was gazed at 
fixedly, and taken, literally, to that great, imquiet 
heart. He ate more readily, praised the "good, strong, 
EngHsh sleep," was shy of company, tasted the sights 
meekly but charily, and was faithful, as far as in him lay, 
to his own pretty motto that ''idlesse is the business of 
age." At Canterbury, he proposed to send for his wife 
and to spend his last days in the shadow of the great 
archbishopric. In Paris, "a happy week" was spent in 
the society of James Russell Lowell and John Holmes, 
and, zigzagging between train and boat, the party 
arrived, at the close of November, in Rome, where the 
daughter of an old Massachusetts friend welcomed them 
to her beautiful villa high upon the Cselian Hill. The 
last days of the year found them in Alexandria and 
Cairo. 

Throughout the journey Emerson seems to have been 
gracious, passive , planless, a little abstracted, casually 
fond of people, capable of passing sallies of interest and 
vivacity, with retreats into melancholy that strength- 
ened the desire of home. Egypt, which is decay petrified, 
could hardly convince an invalid that his own abey- 
ances were temporary. After a thirty days' trip up the 
Nile, the party returned to Cairo, took ship for Italy, 
found attentions and cordialities in Rome, and in Flor- 
ence met Hermann Grimm, who declared that Emerson 
had the aspect of steel. At Paris, Lowell and John 
Holmes renewed their enchantments, and the whimsical- 
ity of fate brought the American seer into momentary 
contact with Ernest Renan and Henri Taine. By April 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 151 

fifth, the date of the return to London, Emerson's health 
was greatly improved, and his revived power of memory- 
permitted him to accept the daily invitations to lunches 
and dinners which proved that the power of remem- 
bering was not wholly extinct in that whirling capital. 
Even in his old age this imtitled American could jot 
down the names of three dukes in succession in a list 
of the persons encountered in the visit. He met other 
men in whom the world and he felt deeper interest: 
Carlyle, again, with whom he had "real comfort" — a 
phrase of retrospective significance; Browning, whom he 
succeeded in liking in spite of that gentleman's unfor- 
tunate crotchet as to the presence of poetic gifts in a 
certain Shelley; and Ruskin, whose lecture he heartily 
admired, but whose jeremiads on the subject of preva- 
lent social ills he met with a round rebuke. There were 
visits^to Stratford and Edinburgh, and the homeward 
voyage was brightened by the society of Charles Eliot 
Norton, who honored in two noble quatrains the advent 
of Emerson's seventieth birthday in the course of the 
passage. 

On arriving at Concord, he was driven to the new 
house built on the old site in the old fashion. There was 
much honest rejoicing of which no one should speak 
without respect, but the forms taken by the popular 
welcome to this grave and reserved man — a band, a 
school procession, and a triumphal arch — make the 
reader thankful for the omission of pyrotechnics. 

Meanwhile, the publisher, for whom "Letters and 
Social Aims" was to be prepared, had been overtaken 
by death, and the regret of Emerson for this mischance 



152 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

may have been lightened by a prospect of release from 
obligations. This gentleman, however, whose profes- 
sional aptitude for worrying his clients death itself could 
not paralyze, had bequeathed his rights to Chatto & 
Windus, who forthwith appealed to Emerson to carry 
out his agreement. The distress that followed this ap- 
peal was finally relieved by an application to James 
Elliot Cabot, Emerson's old friend and destined biog- 
rapher, to arrange the scattered materials into compact 
essays and to supervise the printing of the book. This 
work was completed in December, 1875, but it must be 
remembered that this is the date of the compilation 
only, not of the material, which is of various unascer- 
tained dates and represents no specific phase of Emer- 
son's development. 

The close of Emerson's life is marked by the gentle 
advance of decay, sapping his mental strength, but spar- 
ing in great measure both his serenity and his cheerful- 
ness. A trifling circumstance, a mere nothing with that 
property inherent in certain nothings of fixing them- 
selves ineradicably in the mind, is recorded of his visit 
in 1866 to the St. Denis Hotel in New York, of his read- 
ing of the beautiful poem, "Terminus," to his son, and 
of that son's first shocked reaHzation that his father had 
begun to feel the curb of age. The intellectual decline 
was most obvious in the failure of memory. He had been 
characterized, in mature life at least, by a dehberate and 
exquisite nicety in the culling of words for the ends of 
conversation, suggesting to Dr. Holmes the image of a 
man crossing a brook on stepping-stones; and the form 
of aphasia which now supervened seemed an adoption 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 15S 

by nature of this hesitant delicacy. He lost his hold upon 
common words; Moncure D. Conway reports that he 
spoke of a chair as that which supports the human frame 
and of a plough as the implement that cultivates the 
soil; and adds that at Longfellow's funeral Emerson 
said, "That gentleman was a sweet, beautiful soul, but 
I have entirely forgotten his name." 

After 1866, he wrote httle. The preparation of "Let- 
ters and Social Aims " was handed over to Mr. Cabot's 
tireless fidelity. It is pleasant to be told in the "Jour- 
nals" that "Parnassus," the anthology of verse issued 
in 1874, was the outcome of his daughter Edith's sym- 
pathy with Emerson's pleasure in poetry and her in- 
sistence that he should collect his favorites into a printed 
volume. The lectm-ing still went on, even after the once 
plethoric "Journals" had grown meagre, and the rarity 
of his letters taxed the patience of his correspondents. 
The reading of discourses on quiet and friendly occa- 
sions did not quite cease imtil 1880, the year preceding 
his death. At such times his daughter Ellen invari- 
ably sat near him on the platform, to sustain him by her 
presence, and to lend aid, when occasion bade, in the 
taming of the rebellious manuscript. Embarrassments 
sometimes occurred, now and then a source of discom- 
fiture, but quite as often borne with a fortitude which 
found an admirable second in the patience of his audi- 
ence. On one occasion he read the same page twice, and 
his daughter begged him to read the lectures regularly 
to her in advance. But he gently put aside the request, 
not doubting the generosity of his tried hearers. Emer- 
son, gracious as he was, loved his own way and his old 



154. RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

way; otherwise, between filial devotion and mechanical 
ingenuity, the recurrence of such difficulties was surely 
preventable. A discourteous reception at the University 
of Virginia in 1876, when Civil- War feeling still smoul- 
dered in the South, subjected his constancy to another 
and sharper form of strain, but his remark to Mr. Cabot 
on the occurrence was merely that "they are very brave 
people down there, and say just what they think." 

His condition was in many ways happy: his income 
was assured, his reputation estabHshed; Harvard had 
made him Overseer, and the University of Glasgow had 
barely saved itself from the indiscretion of choosing 
him Lord Rector by timely reflection on the higher liter- 
ary claims of the author of "Vivian Grey." Emerson's 
children were prosperous: his daughter Edith, now Mrs. 
William H. Forbes, added the sprightliness of grand- 
children to his life; his son Edward, after the comple- 
tion of his medical studies, had married Miss Keyes, 
daughter of Hon. John S. Keyes, of Concord, and had 
settled to his life-work in that town; the eldest daugh- 
ter remained the support and solace of the home. His 
own mood was generally cheerful; the haze which ob- 
scured his mind was so permeated with light as to seem 
at times, like certain hazes in nature, barely distin- 
guishable from a glow. He had always loved men in 
his fashion; in his old age even the scapegrace world 
seems to have nested shyly in some out-of-the-way 
crevice of his heart. His solicitude for Mr. Cabot, whose 
health rather than whose task he gently supervised, is 
touched with beauty. His conversation at this period is 
reported to have shown a "uniform and unforced cheer- 



THE WESTERING WHEEL 155 

fulness." He could still join in his dainty fashion in the 
fireside merriment, and make sport of his "naughty 
memory." Dr. Le Baron Russell furnished Dr. Holmes 
with a pleasantly characteristic anecdote which brings 
out that delicate histrionism that shimmered playfully 
here and there on the surface of his sincerity. In the 
garden, on a June morning, Emerson, standing admir- 
ingly before one of his wife's fresh-blown roses, "by a 
sudden impulse lifted his hat gently, and said with a low 
bow, *I take off my hat to it.'" 

However, no degree of patience could render the sub- 
sidence of faculty otherwise than painful to one to whom 
its exercise had been so inspiriting. Friendly beholders 
were touched to pity by the "intensity of his silent at- 
tention to every word that was said." A visitor, in 1881, 
whose record is copied by Alexander Ireland, reports an 
"indescribable pathos" in Emerson's references to him- 
self. "My health is good enough," he dropped indiffer- 
ently, and added: "But when one's wits begin to fail, 
it is time for the heavens to open and take him away." 

He had not long to wait for the kindly interposition 
of the heavens. On Sunday, April 16, 1881, he attended 
church and took his usual walk: on Thursday the £7th, 
he was dead. A cold, too slight at first to alarm his family 
or to hinder his exercise, opened the way for pneumonia 
to which his enfeebled powers could oppose no vigorous 
resistance. There was little acute suffering, and no 
delirium; a dimness, however, overhung his mind, and 
a mistaken sense that he was ill in a friend's house. In 
the days when he still went downstairs, he had glanced 
at the portrait of Carlyle in his study, and had spoken 



156 RALPH WALDO EMERSON j 

fondly, "That is my man." Somewhat later, a friend 
recalls a grave, recollected utterance or stately chant in 
a voice of almost unimpaired resonance heard in his 
chamber, during the intervals of slumber, in the night. 
Among the last gleams that pierced the light mist that 
veiled his mind in the closing days were a tender farewell 
to his wife and a last longing reversion to the deep-eyed 
boy. 

The 30th of April was appointed for the obsequies. 
Between the private service at the house and the brief, 
closing rites at the grave, the need of public ceremonial, 
which even the sincerest grief cannot allay in Americans, 
found expression in a third solemnity at the church, 
where tributes, including addresses by E. R. Hoar and 
James Freeman Clarke and a sonnet by Alcott, were 
read in the presence of the body. All was wisely and 
tastefully done after its kind, but one likes better to 
think of the tall pine tree upon the hill-top in Sleepy 
Hollow, in whose shadow they had scooped his grave, 
and of the unhewn block of native rose-quartz that 
guides the steps of friend or pilgrim to the resting-place 
of those revered ashes. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE HARVEST 

This chapter will be occupied with a review of Emer- 
son's prose works; a succeeding chapter will handle the 
general characteristics of his prose, and a third will 
discuss his poetry. 

"Nature " is exceptional as a first work in which both 
the thought and the style of the author are perfectly 
mature and in which — by an even rarer exception — • 
both are seen at almost their highest level. In the 
thought of this work, Emerson, always munificent, rises 
to sheer prodigaHty; it is, as Dr. Garnett says, "the 
most intense and quintessential of his writings"; with 
the exception of the doctrines of "Compensation" and 
"Self -Reliance," it virtually epitomizes his philosophy. 
Emerson's growth was that of a helix; first the core, 
central, vital, and compact, then the inner rings, then 
outer rings of more bulk and greater diameter as they 
recede successively from the central heart. "Nature" 
was the innermost, smallest, and most vital spire in the 
concentric structure. The review of the doctrine may 
be left to a future chapter, since it seems preferable to 
confine ourselves to the peculiarities or differentia of the 
works as we reach them in order of time and to reserve 
for subsequent collective discussion their common prop- 
erties of thought and style. 



158 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

The plan of "Nature" is not only clear-cut and em- 
phatic; it is one of the most effective plans in this form 
of literature. It is impressive and picturesque as well 
as perspicuous: the poetic mind's submission, in this 
instance, to the restraints of obvious plan, may have 
arisen from the fact that the plan itself was poetic. The 
ascent of the ends of Nature from commodity to beauty, 
from beauty to language, from language to discipline, 
from discipline to spirit (passing over idealism as not 
strictly an end or use) is a curiously perfect stratifica- 
tion, comprising, not strata of earth, but rather strata 
of cloud, rising one upon another in airier and airier 
substance to their melting-point in the blue empyrean. 

"Nature" is the most clear-edged, the most serrate, 
of all Emerson's essays; but, in the master of paradox, 
this is no inhibition to its being at the same time con- 
spicuous for flow and pHancy. The same combination 
of opposites is shown in waves, where the definition of 
crest and trough is continuous and salient, but where 
the contrasted effect of fusion and plasticity is equally 
notable. The work is fluid, because its quality is youthful; 
indeed, it is the one work of Emerson that conveys strik- 
ingly the effect of youth. His earlier experiments in the 
"Journals " are rather juvenile than young, and, if parts 
of his later work seem ageless, what has been arrested 
and perpetuated is not nonage but maturity. But in 
"Nature," written at thirty-three, the fervor of bodily 
youth is not yet extinct, and is mixed, in this fortunate 
period of his life, with the elation of spiritual discovery. 
Hence the eagerness and swiftness of the work, the note 
of exaltation which made Holmes rightly say that the 



THE HARVEST 159 

chapters might quite as aptly be called cantos. Hence 
that quality as of a revived Te Deum : " We praise thee, 
O God; we acknowledge thee to be the Lord. Heaven 
and earth are full of the majesty of thy glory." Hence 
the attainment of opulence with concision, more strictly, 
the attainment of opulence by concision, since when 
expression is retrenched to the maxim briefly uttered 
and its enforcing illustrations, six or ten illustrations so 
grouped suffice to convey an impression of affluence. 

That this munificence of beauty should have impressed 
so lightly a public, accustomed to admire Coleridge, 
Byron, and Shelley, seems at first sight a problem hard 
to solve. That the thought of "Nature" should not 
have penetrated the Bostonian organism is expKcable 
enough. It was not the kind of thought that penetrates: 
it was a thought seK-enclosed, self-ensphered, cohering 
so fully with itself and so little with the everyday as- 
pects of life and reason that it floated aloof in space with 
the grandeur but also the isolation of a planet. Three 
things which relate the subsequent Emersonian work 
to fife — the direct counsel, such as "Trust thyself"; 
the plain concrete fact, such as Bonaparte's cheating at 
cards; and the homely image, such as the soul's "mumps 
and measles and whooping-coughs" — are either absent 
from "Nature" or are found in amounts too small to 
affect the total impression. These things tend to make 
the higher Boston public, not inteUigent certainly but 
perfectly inteUigible, in its refusal to see in "Nature" 
anything more significant than a star "languorous with 
divine excess." We are more surprised by its indiffer- 
ence to the blaze of imagery. Possibly, however, the 



160 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



1 



very dazzle of that imagery interfered with its instant 
appreciation; the eye which is quick to notice the pearl 
in a woman's ear may pass unmoved by a jeweller's 
window. 

The oration on "The American Scholar" was de- 
livered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cam- 
bridge on the 31st of August, 1837. Objection might be 
made to the title of "The American Scholar" as a double 
misnomer, since the oration does not deal properly with 
America, though America is vaguely sighted, in a misty 
cape or two off the horizon, in the concluding section of 
the discourse, and it does not deal with scholarship in 
the usual and normal sense. Emerson's "Scholar" is 
almost as much a personal appurtenance as Carlyle's 
"Hero," and, while quarrelling about definitions is easy 
and useless, it is a little unfortunate to use the new 
definition on an occasion which gives peculiar emphasis 
to the old. A man may discourse on "The Catholic 
Faith," using "catholic" in its radical sense of "uni- 
versal," to a mixed assemblage without impropriety; 
but there would be something infeHcitous in the appli- 
cation of this meaning to the term before an assembly 
expressly composed of Romanists. Emerson views the 
scholar as "Man Thinking," or man converting experi- 
ence of all kinds into wisdom — functions which pertain 
to scholars (in the vulgar sense) not as scholars but as a 
section of humanity. The term particularizes a respon- 
sibility which is really universal. 

The ordering and marshalling of this oration would 
have overcome any prejudice less ingrained than that 



THE HARVEST 161 

which charges the hapless Emerson with constitutional 
want of system. That it divides smoothly into three 
admirably proportioned sections, with subdivisions, 
always fitting and sometimes excellent, will merely 
furnish a resolute public with one more proof of the 
impertinence of facts. 

One notes with interest that, while the matter of the 
discourse is opposed to university tradition, the style is, 
for Emerson, academic and clerical, or, more properly, 
perhaps, the tone is academic and clerical in opposition 
to both style and matter. The style has its temerities, 
both homely and florid; but the discourse is low in tone 
even where it is high in coloring, though now and then 
a leonine sentence makes its voice resonant through the 
level and tranquil spaces. For example, **Let him not 
quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the 
ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the 
crack of doom." Or that other far-resounding cry, " If 
the single man plant himself indomitably on his in- 
stincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round 
to him." 

Less than a year later came the Divinity School 
Address. Of this momentous but tranquil discourse, 
in which, reversing Mr. Kipling's phrase, the thunder 
came up like dawn, we may say that, as printed to-day, 
it is a discourse to be enjoyed by paragraphs. Its total- 
ity is not impressive, or, to be exact, it is its totality 
rather than its integrity (in the strict sense) that im- 
presses us. Even here the arrangement is not logically 
faulty; the rich keynote in the opening paragraph, the 



162 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

exposition of the infinitude of morals and the beauty of 
hoHness, the statement of two leading impediments to 
the reception of this infinitude and beauty, the exhorta- 
tion to young preachers to resist these impediments and 
to possess themselves of their inheritance, — this con- 
stitutes an order of which Edmund Burke, if not Daniel 
Webster, would have been quite competent to see the 
point. The difficulty is psychological, or, in other words, 
rhetorical, rhetoric being in the last analysis only the 
concretion of one segment of psychology. The sequence 
of moods is unlucky. The first haK-dozen pages are a 
kind of "Gloria in excelsis," an august and lofty jubilee; 
from these we drop with precipitate abruptness into 
several paragraphs of incisive and destroying criticism, 
perfect of their kind, better, indeed, than the precedent 
rhapsodies, but producing, in the wake of these rhapso- 
dies, the ejffect of the Epistle to the Romans in imme- 
diate succession to the concluding chapters of the 
Apocalypse. After divinities and miracles have been 
summarily routed, twice the space is accorded to a second 
much less drastic point of criticism, the soullessness of 
preaching. Having taken Rome in one week, the reader 
asks, why spend two in the conquest of Ostia! The re- 
currence to psalmody and dithyramb in the last part 
meets, of course, a diminished responsiveness. A better 
order could readily be devised: first, the magnificent 
opening as it stands; second, the treatment of preaching, 
which as fact, as symptom, and as subsidiary point has 
a claim to priority among the criticisms; third, the as- 
sault on persons and on miracles; and lastly, as logical 
result, rhetorical ascent, and practical incentive, the 



THE HARVEST 163 

dive into the empyrean. The risk of pedantry and seem- 
ing captiousness in these specifications is cheerfully in- 
curred for the sake of illustrating a defect of Emerson 
which is much more serious than the much-lamented 
and largely mythical want of logical continuity. Emer- 
son's treatment is lofty and striking, but commodious it 
is not; his rhetoric, like his ethics, makes scanty allow- 
ance for human infirmity. 

We may observe in passing that, while in the storm- 
centre of his discourse, the passages on Jesus, Emerson's 
serenity is unperturbed, on the relatively amicable topic 
of preaching he very nearly loses his temper, a phenome- 
non so rare that it may possibly account for another 
equally rare circumstance, his difficulty in persuading 
himself to leave the subject. Emerson's discourse drew 
its matter and coloring largely from private experience, 
and the bitter hours which he had passed under the 
ministrations of Mr. Frost of Concord — a preacher 
who seems to have justified his name in the congealing 
effect he produced upon the most distinguished of his 
auditors — and other clergymen of the glacial type 
spoke out in these biting and restive paragraphs. One 
would like to know how far Emerson's attitude was 
shared by his contemporaries, how far it was imaged in 
the young hearts of that senior class from whose irre- 
coverable sensations in that electric Sunday evening one 
would so gladly lift a corner of the veil. The question 
of short commons is a question of appetite as well as 
food; Emerson's need of intellectual and religious sus- 
tenance was great; and possibly in this discourse he re- 
sembled some brawny beef -fed Englishman who should 



164 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

endeavor to incite some abstinent Southern population 
to revolt against their simple regimen of goat's milk, 
bread, and olives. It is very probable that Emerson's 
arraignment — never repeated, we think, with like em- 
phasis in any recorded public utterance — overstated 
the facts as they would have appeared to a dispassionate 
and normal observer. It seems proper to assume that 
a clerical body whose leaders included, or were soon to 
include. Dr. Channing, Theodore Parker, and James 
Freeman Clarke, — to say nothing of that Border raider 
R. W. Emerson, — must have comprised in its minor 
clergy many men earnest and genuine enough to act as 
inspirations and stimuli to an ordinary congregation. 
If they could not inspire Emerson, one is tempted to 
ask. Should Dives invite himself to dine with Lazarus? 
The Address contains many fervid aiBfirmations of 
the power and splendor of the divine force, but it is 
noticeable that these canticles do not include the most 
beautiful passage in the oration. That passage is the 
stately opening description in which the summer of 
1838 is made enviable to all subsequent generations. 
We listen, not with coldness, but with a certain mildness 
of response, to the high soprano key in which Emerson 
proclaims the loftiness of the religious sentiment. "Won- 
derful is its power to charm and to command. It is a 
mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world. It is 
myrrh and storax, and chlorine and rosemary. It makes 
the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the 
stars is in it." A passage like this leaves us, as it were, 
very grateful for very handsome treatment. We are not 
so bad as Stevenson's imbending widow with her candid. 



THE HARVEST 165 

"I 'm sure we all ought to be very much obliged to you." 
We are very much obliged. But how different is our re- 
sponse to the penetrating bass note of that organ pre- 
lude with which the Address opens: "In this refulgent 
summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. 
The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted 
with fire and gold in the tint of flowers." It is the rule 
with Emerson, that, in the passionate outpour of his 
deepest feelings, where he should theoretically be most 
impressive, he is less winning than in the treatment of 
matters further from his heart. The reason may well 
be that these hymns to Deity are the abstract of many 
diverse hours, and reproduce no defined experience ex- 
clusively and sharply. 

The passage that made the trouble in this address 
is in bulk a small affair; it occupies, in the Centenary 
Edition of the "Works," a little more than five pages in 
a discourse which itself fills a little less than thirty-three. 
It is pervaded by that expectation of assent which in 
Emerson was partly constitutional and instinctive, and 
partly a fine superadded touch of histrionic deftness. 
He is not assailing a stronghold, or fighting a battle: 
he is clearing a path. Emerson handles the topics of the 
so-called divinity of Christ and of the authenticity of 
miracles merely because they lie, in a double sense, in 
his way ; they are obvious, in the fine etymological sense 
of that word, and they are obstructive. The fine con- 
tempt with which he details, so to speak, a few para- 
graphs for the demolition of the fastnesses of Unitarian 
dogma is in itself sufficiently exhilarating, and nothing 
can be more admirable than the perfect clear-headed- 



166 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

ness and mastery — not of logic exactly but of an ex- 
position congruous with logic — with which he unfolds 
the alternative view. It would be rash to say that 
Emerson has not his tenebrous moments, that it is al- 
ways the groping beholder's own density which mis- 
takes the fog on the earth for the cloud in the heavens; 
it is true, nevertheless, that his intellectual clarity on 
many occasions might serve as exemplar to thinkers 
and critics. 

On July 24, 1838, nine days after the resonant or 
repercussive Cambridge Address, Emerson delivered 
before the literary societies of Dartmouth College an 
oration called "Literary Ethics." The subject is much 
larger than the title, deals not so much with literature 
as with "scholarship" in the spacious Emersonian 
sense, and is deftly apportioned among three subtopics, 
the resources, the subject, and the discipline, of the 
scholar. The first section, though novel doubtless at 
the time and place, contains little that is markedly 
significant for the habitual traveller on the Emersonian 
turnpike. But in the second section, the oration re- 
news itself, with quickened incisiveness, in the glow of 
demonstrating that literature has left no mark upon the 
indefeasible originality of landscape, and that the foot- 
print of all human philosophy, even the inclusive or 
eclectic philosophies, upon the broad tract of truth is 
equally imperceptible. There follows a landscape pas- 
sage full of the exuding turpentine which it incidentally 
mentions, and the landscape which follows on the op- 
posite page has the gusto of the sombrely and austerely 
real. The demolition of the claim of eclecticism to 



THE HARVEST 167 

finality, the affirmation that the last word on any sub- 
ject is unspeakable, are carried out with the same force 
and trenchancy. 

The third section of "Literary Ethics" is less con- 
tinuously lusty and robust, but the beautiful temper of 
Emerson's mind (using the word "temper" in its most 
intimate and pregnant sense), the poise of that equa- 
torial constitution between the attractions of opposite 
poles, is clearly shown in the just weight given to the 
adverse claims of society and solitude and the almost 
equal insistence on drill and inspiration. The appeal in 
the conclusion is august, almost tragic, in its solemnity: 
"When you shall say, * As others do, so will I; I renounce, 
I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good 
of the land and let learning and romantic expectations 
go, until a more convenient season;' — then dies the 
man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and 
poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thou- 
sand thousand men." The passing bell of a dead soul 
has never been tolled more impressively. 

The "Method of Nature," an address read on August 
11, 1841, before a literary society of Waterville College, 
Maine, is the receptacle of certain ideas hardly else- 
where to be duplicated in the "Works" or the "Jour- 
nals" of the self -repeating Emerson. This circumstance 
heightens the interest of the lecture, but lessens the 
significance of the ideas. Emerson's mind was both 
excursive and adhesive, but the emphatic truth on this 
point — a truth which the "Works" clearly establish 
and the "Journals" amply confirm — is that the ideas 



168 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

which he loved he frequented. Occurrence without re- 
currence may be taken as indicative of the failure of a 
thought to call forth his lasting interest and regard. 

The lecture itself, moreover, awakens a momentary 
impatience even in minds which commonly view an im- 
patience with Emerson as the badge — or brand — of 
the Philistine. We are told that the method of Nature 
is circular, and the discourse is as unapproachable, as 
intractable, and as evasive as a revolving wheel. Indeed, 
one is sometimes reminded of that astronomic hypothe- 
sis which associates strong rotary motion with a great 
nebula. Nature, we are told, has a succession of ends, 
a universe of ends; no particular aim can be specified. 
"Is not man the end? " asks the hesitating reader. "No," 
says Emerson, in effect, "man is not good enough" — 
a view that sounds strangely on the lips of a writer who 
has almost composed a Hturgy in praise of the divinity 
of man. Man must model himseK on Nature; he, too, 
must have a universe of ends seeking nothing in partic- 
ular, seeking only the expression, by elastic and chang- 
ing methods, of the divine force which he embodies. If 
this be true, as seems not improbable, it is nevertheless 
confusing and disheartening, and we cannot but feel 
that Nature's wise maternal practice of sanative illu- 
sion for her younger children has been brusquely in- 
terfered with by some forward older brother's blurting 
out of the unseasonable truth. 

The best things in the "Method of Nature" are the 
keenly and loftily discriminating second paragraph, 
and the surprisingly affectionate tribute to the "old re- 
ligion" with its teaching of "privation, self-denial, and 



THE HARVEST 169 

sorrow." The simile that enforces this truth — per- 
haps the most rememberable thing in the discourse — 
illustrates the readiness of Emerson to tap the trees for 
other than saccharine benefits: "A man was bom not 
for prosperity, but to suffer for the benefit of others, 
Hke the noble rock-maple which all around our villages 
bleeds for the service of man." 

"Man the Reformer," delivered before the "Me- 
chanics' Apprentices' Library Association " of Boston, 
is a much more significant and satisfactory performance. 
When an idealist approaches social wrongs, one expects 
three things, ignorance, heat, and extremes. This ora- 
tion shows information, coolness, and a middle ground. 
It exhibits a rare sensitiveness to the fact of personal 
implication in social evils, and a comparative indiffer- 
ence to social wrongs as objective facts independent of 
such implications. Self -extrication or self-defence is the 
end in view. 

The whole discourse has a superficial resemblance to 
the work of some cool intellectualist, some disengaged 
and unconcerned observer, to whom social needs are 
nothing more than a discipline of the intellect and wit. 
But the likeness is altogether misleading. Emerson's 
interest in reform, or rather in renovation, was sincere 
and far-reaching — too far-reaching to be readily in- 
flamed by specific causes and occasions. His hunger was 
not greedy precisely because it was insatiable. Of two 
travellers, one, refusing to stop at the half-way house, 
pushes on to the large town which is his destination: 
he may stand for the average radical. The other, for 



170 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

whom the large town is itself a half-way house, whose 
destination is on the verge of the continent, stops con- 
tentedly at the first good lodging-place; he may stand 
for Emerson. Both differ sharply from the man who 
stays at home. 

The lecture on the "Times" (December 2, 1841) is 
not to be ranked among Emerson's successes. It is slow 
both in getting under way and in coming into port; it 
is tight-packed, and its movements are unwieldy. One 
looks in vain for some breathing-hole or embrasure in 
the firm masonry of its ranged and solid paragraphs. 
Pictures of two kinds of men, active reformers and stu- 
dents or spectators, are presented. The sketch of the 
active partisans borrows interest from causticity; "they 
bite us," says Emerson, "and we run mad." The at- 
tempt to visualize the student class is abortive; and the 
long, imposing passage on spiritual reality evokes def- 
erence rather than sympathy. 

It is a singular fact that the most entertaining oration 
in the volume of addresses should have been called forth 
by that not very promising topic, the "Conservative" 
(December 9, 1841). The author seems to have worn 
himself out, or rather to have refreshed and enlivened 
himself, in the production of varied reliefs and condi- 
ments. There is a whimsical fable in which the old 
Greek gods are felicitously burlesqued; there is, by way 
of counterpoise, a pleasing and pungent narrative of a 
mediaeval saint; there are pages on pages filled with the 
livehest argumentative dialogue, a device of which, so 



THE HARVEST 171 

far as we recall, this oration has the monopoly; and as 
for similes and metaphors and like relishes, the feast 
amazes us by its luxury, though we knew at the outset 
that we dined with LucuUus. 

Most writers who credit themselves with a wish to 
present both sides of a question entrust the defence of 
the less favored side to imbeciles. In Emerson both 
partisans are reasonable, respectful, self-possessed, and 
good-humored, and all this without the slightest det- 
riment to the zest and vigor of the debate. Emerson's 
attitude is that of the father who watches a wresthng- 
match between his boys, and to whom a lusty stroke 
on either side is ground for complacency. At the end 
he is ranged with the liberals, but he protracts the 
journey toward the ultimata. 

"The Transcendentalist " was deKvered in January, 
1842, at the Masonic Temple, Boston. The admirable 
(though not invariable) perspicuity of Emerson's mind 
which often made him the most luminous of expositors, 
is exhibited in the strong, assured, yet dynamic and pro- 
gressive, explanation of the difference between idealism 
and materialism. What calmness! what mastery! what 
easy, natural control and pilotage of the materials ! Most 
of the professional clarifiers and strainers seem muddy 
beside this soothsayer of whom the best they could say 
was: "He is a dreamer; let us leave him. — Pass." 

All goes well for a few pages, but Emerson is speedily 

(Overtaken by a luckless impulse to sketch the Tran- 

scendentalists in the concrete, and the concreteness is of 

a sort to make its victims sigh for the shelter of a merci- 



172 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

ful abstraction. The thing is done in a friendly spirit, 
as the reader has to remind himself with increasing em- 
phasis at the end of every deadly paragraph. It is al- 
most inconceivable that Emerson should have made a 
present to enemies and satirists of this picture of mawk- 
ish, querulous, self-conscious youth in whom the Ger- 
man romanticist seems to have been grafted on the 
moon-struck Elizabethan. Our sense of humor — a 
profane faculty, indeed, but one for whose education 
the gentle Emerson is partly responsible — finds nutri- 
ment in these idlers and solitaries whose inclusion in a 
serious discourse seems a robbery of comic opera. 

The last lecture in the first volume of the "Works," 
called the "Young American," is of later date than the 
others — February 7, 1844. It contains many pleasing 
remarks on those national and practical themes on 
which felicity is habitual with Emerson, but its total 
effect is a little perplexing and irritating, because, in 
place of the plan which it affects to emphasize, the 
reader sees Httle but an aggregate of scattered reflec- 
tions on American life. Return to the land is approved; 
trade, which always had a spell for Emerson, is eulogized; 
and communism, or communitarianism, is praised with 
reservations. One cannot forbear quoting the serenely 
dare-devil remark: "As if the Union had any other real 
basis than the good pleasure of a majority of the citizens 
to be united." 

In March, 1841, appeared the first series of Emerson's 
"Essays," published in Boston by James Munroe and 



THE HARVEST 173 

Company. An English edition, of which Eraser under- 
took the expense and Carlyle furnished the preface, 
shortly followed. 

The twelve essays in this epoch-making volume, over 
which the world, with its characteristic mixture of busi- 
ness and laziness, refused to excite itself, are divisible 
into two groups — a division extensible to nearly all 
the essay work in later volumes. Dr. Emerson has 
rightly suggested that the place for "The Over-Soul" 
is directly after "Self-ReKance." This agrees well with 
the fairly evident truth that ^ve of the "Essays " — 
"History," "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," "Spirit- 
ual Laws," and "The Over-Soul " — constitute a defined 
group of which both the substance and the method are 
pecuUar; they take up the articles in the Emersonian 
"Credo," and each is built on the simple plan of illus- 
trating one (in "Spiritual Laws" possibly two or three) 
basic principle with an abundance and variety of brief, 
rapid examples hardly to be paralleled in literature. 
There follows the same combined effect of simplicity 
and bewilderment which is produced by the movement in 
a single direction of a vast and parti-colored assemblage. 

The other essays in this and subsequent volumes are 
moulded on another plan. They select some topic — 
love, prudence, experience, gifts — which is related to 
the main Emersonian truth after the fashion of a trans- 
verse rib or cross-bar, and their method is to trace this 
rib or bar to its point of intersection with the grand 
trunk; they divide into several lobes or sections, each 
of which comprises its own relatively small group of 
illustrative materials. In reviewing the essays in the 



174 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

"First Series," vfe shall, as before with the orations, 
confine ourselves for the moment to mere differentiae; 
universalities, whether of thought or style, will be ad- 
journed to a future chapter. 

In the mere yield of illustration by a single idea, the 
essay on "History" is perhaps the most remarkable 
tour deforce extant in Emerson or in anybody else. The 
main thought is that every phase in the external or 
objective record of men and things (including not only 
history in the official sense, but literature, mythology, 
art, and, at a pinch, the data of science itself) is dupli- 
cated and hence foretold in the spirit of the individual. 
The singleness of the idea is, indeed, somewhat modified 
by the inclusion of examples of unity in variety among 
the several parts of the objective record itself; but, even 
with this allowance, the concentration, the centripe- 
tence, of the imagery remains astonishing. There is no 
break or slackening in the illustrations, and their feli- 
city is commensm-ate with their abundance. We are re- 
minded of Wordsworth's 

"iSowers that with one scarlet gleam 
Cover a hundred leagues, and seem 
To set the hills on fire." 

The essay, indeed, furnishes as unmixed and delicate 
a pleasure as anything in Emerson. Its refinement and 
tranquillity are pervasive; its meaning can usually be 
had on "easy terms"; it presses no stern claims; it is all 
a proffer of homage and a bestowal of privilege. Its 
geniality is perhaps more keenly felt by virtue of the 
contrast with its relatively bumptious and contentious 
neighbor "Self -Reliance." 



THE HARVEST 175 

"Self -Reliance" is the most spinous and bristling of 
the essays of Emerson, as it is unquestionably one of the 
greatest . With the exception of two or three sentences in 
"Spiritual Laws," it is almost the only essay in which 
our own tolerant generation perceives that "nipping 
and eager air" which bit so shrewdly into the more sen- 
sitive cuticle of his contemporaries. It contains the 
memorable "Devil's child" reply, magnificent at least 
as rhetoric; the rasping "Are they my poor?" the 
scoffing "alms to sots"; and the suggestion that even 
the domestic affections may be snares and impediments. 
Yet even in this, the most trenchant of the essays, the 
eye is faced at every other turning by some devout, 
idyllic, or inspiring passage. One has a certain feeling, 
moreover, that Emerson is not quite himself in these 
very paragraphs in which the horror of not being one's 
seK is so drastically presented; there is a little self- 
coercion in this stinging defence of spontaneity. Not 
that this is felt everywhere or even frequently. Emer- 
son is himself when he tells us that our rejected thoughts 
"come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." 
He is himself again when he exhorts: "Speak what you 
think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to- 
morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict 
everything you said to-day." But in the well-known 
passage beginning with "Are they my poor? " and clos- 
ing with the "wicked dollar," one feels that here is 
wrath which a little nursing has helped to keep warm, 
that here is language which the fear of inadequacy has 
exacerbated. 

The vigor which marks Emerson and the tension 




176 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

which sometimes makes that vigor a little disquiei 
are both exhibited at their maximum in "Self -Reli- 
ance." These few pages contain most of the destruc- 
tive criticisms which have given edge to the essayist's 
fame, — the attacks on conformity, on consistency, on 
"philanthropy," on travelling, on imitation, on social 
progressiveness, — a curiously mild-looking list of evils 
and scourges if one stops to meditate. Some of these 
have scarcely recovered their standing, though it is to 
be feared they have retained their influence, since the 
Emersonian onslaught; since his date their very bully- 
ing is hangdog. No essay of Emerson contains so many 
phrases that are at the same time barbed and winged. 

" Self -Reliance " is structurally ineffective; after the 
first inclusive paragraph, the reader is in the distressed 
condition of those children who have received all their 
presents in the first ten minutes of the long Christmas 
day. It is unfortunate, also, in rising to a specular 
mount in the middle of its course and in baffling the 
expectations of finality thus produced by a sudden re- 
descent into the asperities of the plain and market-place. 
No essay shows us more traits or sides of Emerson, but 
the features somehow intercept the face. It is like- 
wise true that, while the treatment is a compendium 
of the Emersonian moods and style, it is subject as a 
whole to a criticism which does not apply to its sepa- 
rate paragraphs or to its companion essays, "History," 
"Compensation," or "Spiritual Laws"; it lacks tone. 
There is a singularly mixed effect of anthem, eclogue, 
sermon, and denunciation. 

"Compensation" is, of all the essays of Emerson, the 



THE HARVEST 177 

most harassing — not to say the most harrowing — to 
the analyst. We may remark first of all that there is 
a fusion — or confusion — between the two doctrines 
that every sweet has its sour and that every sin has its 
punishment, — an unhappy conjunction, since, if pleas- 
ure as such is penal, the provision which makes guilt 
penal likewise loses half its dignity and effectiveness. 
Furthermore, there is an oscillation between the prin- 
ciple of debt, which rests on equivalence, and the prin- 
ciple of the tax, which implies merely abatement. Never- 
theless, the work has real virtues; the mere muster of 
illustrations is imposing, and by simple mass, by sheer 
tonnage, so to speak, almost conquers the imagination; 
and the essay, by a diverting paradox, makes use of 
exaggeration and overstatement to bring out the great 
moderative principle in things which sets bounds to the 
intensity and the duration of happiness and suffering 
alike. "Compensation," moreover, is a brisk, nimble, 
companionable essay, attractive even to those with 
whom "The Over-Soul" is responsible for headaches. 
The relish of Emerson for these cumulative particulars 
is unmistakable. He watches with inward gusto the 
good, housewifely universe making her shrewd bargains 
with her greedy customers, and with fatal certainty 
getting the best of it, or (as he would say) the right of 
it, in her chafferings with the butcher, milkman, and 
tin-peddler. The phrase, "the stern ethics that sparkles 
on his chisel-edge," is happily expressive of the essay's 
tenor. 

"Spiritual Laws" ranks first in nobility, perhaps, 
among the essays of its author. Its opening has that 



178 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

tempered magnificence which he sometimes, in an in- 
dulgent mood, allows us to have by way of change from 
the relatively cheap diet of unstinted aflOiuence which, 
at his table, is our daily fare. (At that board it is 
a luxury to fast.) "When the act of reflection takes 
place in the mind, when we look at ourselves in the light 
of thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in 
beauty. Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing 
forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and 
stale, but even the tragic and terrible, are comely as 
they take their place in the pictures of memory. The 
river-bank, the weed at the water-side, the old house, 
the foolish person, however neglected in the passing, 
have a grace in the past. Even the corpse that has lain 
in the chambers has added a solemn ornament to the 
house." 

This tranquil and majestic style, this manner that 
clothes the thought as in a stole or pallium, is sustained 
on the whole throughout the essay. It is true that even 
in "Spiritual Laws" he permits himseK moments of 
frowardness. There is the unfortunate Mr. Crump, so 
unjustly handicapped in his pursuit of the ideal by his 
cockney name, whom we are not permitted to admire 
for "his grunting resistance to all his native devils." 
There is that disrespectful reference to original sin, 
origin of evil, and predestination as the soul's mumps 
and measles and whooping-coughs, and the unsym- 
pathetic inquiry as to the motive for dragging the dead 
weight of a Sunday-School over all Christendom! In 
spite of these occasional crackles and sparkles by which 
Emerson wisely warns us against any too sanguine 



THE HARVEST 179 

presumptions of good behavior, the essay produces a 
temple-hke impression of space, purity, and tranquil- 
lity which it would be difficult to parallel in the other 
writings. In "Spiritual Laws" the authority, the sov- 
ereignty, of the prevaihng tone over particular forms 
of imagery is better sustained than in the usual essay. 
Even the plan has its points of superiority; in "His- 
tory" and in "Compensation" we have only a grand 
trunk and innumerable twigs: in "Spiritual Laws" the 
presence of several main thoughts supplies the orna- 
ment of branches. 

Nobody could subscribe to the thoughts in toto, but 
there is nothing in them to overtax the practised reader's 
dexterity in stripping off the exaggerations which con- 
ceal their wisdom. One would hardly set down yielding 
or passiveness in the accepted sense as the initial text 
in the gospel of efficiency, and one's reverence for in- 
consistency must have prospered mightily before the 
doctrine that all things pass for exactly what they are 
worth can be literally accepted on the heels of the other 
doctrine that all values are subjective, that each man 
sees only the value which he embodies. There is wisdom, 
nevertheless, in all these ideas for those who do not 
apply them too rashly, and the wisdom is spacious and 
sunny. 

The essay on "Love" is one of the most curious 
documents in the Emerson collection. The love here 
treated is primarily erotic, and one might have vaguely 
expected a placid disdain, a delicate aloofness, or in- 
dulgent patronage in the handling of such a theme by 
such a man. To our surprise his treatment of the subject 



180 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



1! 



is Venetian; he writes in dithyrambs; he manifests an 
abandonment usually reserved for the Over-Soul and 
its associated topics. That this passion should have 
vibrated strongly in the retentive memory of Emerson 
is explicable enough; his was a soul avid of influxes, so- 
licitous of immersions; he wanted to be swept away, and, 
except in his religious exaltations which came too rarely, 
the privilege was all but inaccessible. The sole occasion 
— up to the date of these essays at least — in which he 
had been swept off his feet by a non-religious motive, 
stood out naturally with monumental distinctness. 

There are, however, several singularities in the ex- 
pression of this youthful ecstasy. Emerson apologizes 
for this seK-indulgence (here as often the apology is the 
offence) by assuring us that these early raptures are 
merely prelusive and preparatory to the spiritual beati- 
fications that are to follow. Now when our saint, in 
some genial hour, has been persuaded, beyond expecta- 
tion, to enter into our tent and break bread with us, it 
is disconcerting to hear him say, as he rises from the 
table, that the act was merely sacramental. We had 
hoped, God forgive us, that he was a little hungry. 
Again, it is interesting to note that when Emerson talks 
from observation he is more attractive than when he 
speaks from experience. In his picture of the love of all 
mankind for a lover, of the school-girls and the "broad- 
faced, good-natured shop-boy," he is altogether charm- 
ing; he is only haff charming in his record of the be- 
havior of this pecuKar person whose head "boils" all 
night on his pillow, and who walks, in the daytime, with 
arms akimbo, soliloquizing and accosting the grass and 



THE HARVEST 181 

the trees. It is true that the very passage from which 
these whimsicaUties are extracted contains exquisite 
things; in fact, it reminds us alternately of the impres- 
siveness of distance-mellowed wedding bells and of the 
rich incrustations of a bridecake. Emerson, in this pas- 
sage which is clearly meant to be glowing, has not so 
much reproduced the glow as a whole as he has demon- 
strated its preexistence and tipped some of his phrases 
with its revived fire. 

Another interesting circumstance must not pass un- 
remarked. The world has shrunk to the man and his 
passion, or rather these have dilated until they have 
become conterminous with the universe, and the rest 
of the world is necessarily shut out. Among the things 
shut out is the woman. The pronouns "she" and "her" 
do not occur in the three pages devoted to the portrayal 
of rapture; the young wooer digests his happiness in 
the forest. Emerson, to do him justice, is not without 
a well-bred sense of the ungraciousness of excluding a 
woman from her own love-affair ; he even comments 
on the strangeness of the fact that this subordination 
should be necessary. 

On the whole, the essay on "Love" is too full of al- 
ternating exhilarations and disappointments to rank 
among satisfying products; but as a unique document 
in the Emerson dossier its significance is undeniable. 
One bitter and moving wail — a wail the more affecting 
that it forces itseff into the midst of the psalmody — 
must be quoted for its disclosure of character: "Alas! 
I know not why, but infinite compunctions embitter in 
mature life the remembrance of budding joy, and cover 



182 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

every beloved name." As contrast and counterpoise to 
this, one may set the last paragraph but one, which 
records gravely and nobly the beneficence of marriage 
in replacing delicate and perishable enchantments by 
assured and uplifting reahties. 

The essay on "Friendship" is the most discomforting 
and estranging performance in the entire volume. If 
he had stopped with his heartening motto, if he had 
even stopped with the two first warm-blooded lines, — 

**A ruddy drop of manly blood 
Tlie surging sea outweighs," — 

he would have left us stimulated and inspired. But this 
is only the parting handshake on the wharf; the next 
moment he has weighed anchor, and is steering lustily 
into the polar sea of this immitigable essay. The dif- 
ficulty for the reader does not lie exclusively or mainly 
in the superior loftiness of Emerson's friendships. Open 
and cultivated minds interest themselves readily enough 
in warm and concrete pictures of feelings which they do 
not vividly share. Men whose taste for painting or music 
is slight read Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi" or "Abt 
Vogler" with emotion. But these men could not in- 
terest others in music or painting, and Emerson's fault 
in this essay is not that he portrayed relations which he 
possessed and others lacked, but that he portrayed a 
friendship to which he only distantly aspired. Emerson's 
portrayal of religious feeling in "The Over-Soul" is 
warm and intimate; it can, therefore, interest people 
who are not temperamentally religious. But his data 
in "Friendship" are hypothetic and imaginary even to 
himself, and the reader who might have crossed the rift 



THE HARVEST 183 

between himself and the live Emerson cannot possibly 
span the further chasm which separates the live Emer- 
son from his vision or phantasm of himself. 

The relation here extolled is not the friendship that 
Emerson expressed and felt for W. H. Furness, for John 
Sterling, and for Thomas Carlyle; it is not the friend- 
ship commemorated in the prefatory versicle. Emerson 
is, as often, beforehand with us in the notation of his 
defect when he says of friendship: "I wish it to be a 
little of a citizen before it is quite a cherub." But he is 
so afraid lest friendship should compromise independ- 
ence and intercourse should compromise friendship that 
the relation seems finally to resolve itself (in the essay) 
into a few retired, almost solitary enjoyments and a 
host of discrediting and disheartening precautions. Two 
friends need not eat together unless they choose; but, 
having sat down at the board together, they cannot 
without absurdity refuse to eat. Two mutual admirers 
need not become friends; but, having entered upon that 
relation, they cannot without fatuity eschew inter- 
course. 

The workmanship of the essay is less attractive than 
usual. Emerson's gift of epigram is faithful in the worst 
extremities; but it forsakes him, much to its credit, 
when he summons it to defend this bloodless and speech- 
less phantasm of friendship. Still, he could not write 
twenty-five pages without being tripped up by felicities. 
The following sentence illustrates a power — shown 
oftener perhaps in his prose than his verse — of putting 
a complete natural picture into a few perfectly chosen 
words: "Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in com- 



184 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

parison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the 
horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the 
brook?" 

The mere title "Prudence," in a volume of this kind, 
is a certificate of sanity; nay, it certifies to more than 
this; it contents and comforts us like the sight of a man 
stopping on his way to greet his king to exchange a 
friendly word with an old nurse or gardener. A passage 
like this in the works of a philosopher is singularly win- 
ning : " The good husband finds method as efficient in the 
packing of fire-wood in a shed or in the harvesting of 
fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular campaigns or the 
files of the Department of State. In the rainy day he 
builds a workbench, or gets his tool-box set in the corner 
of the barn-chamber, and stored with nails, gimlet, 
pincers, screwdriver, and chisel. Herein he tastes an old 
joy of youth and childhood, the cat-like love of garrets^ 
presses, and corn-chambers, and of the conveniences of 
long housekeeping. His garden or his poultry-yard tells 
him many pleasant anecdotes. One might find argu- 
ment for optimism in the abundant flow of this sac- 
charine element of pleasure in every suburb and ex- 
tremity of the good world." One feels that a man who 
can insert a passage of this kind between "Spiritual 
Laws" and "The Over-Soul" is somehow incorrigibly 
lovable; one forgives him even the essay on "Friend- 
ship." 

Emerson, who was, as Lowell said, equally at home 
with pegging shoes and "The Over-Soul," liked the 
plain and homely facts of life both for their symbolic and 
their disciplinary value. He loved to read the great laws 



THE HARVEST 185 

in this rude dialect, and in the commerce between the 
schoolboy, man, and the pedagogue, Nature, he watched 
with almost equal relish the lad's craft in outwitting 
the schoolmaster and the sharp raps on the knuckles 
with which the latter chid his pupil's negligence. 

"Heroism" follows "Prudence" as corrective and 
antitype, and as prudence is resolvable into thrift and 
care, so heroism, byway of contrast, takes on the aspect 
of glorious wastefulness or splendid nonchalance. 

The essay is discursive and sauntering, and its topics 
have a fortuitous or irrelevant quality like the trifling 
remarks exchanged by assembling soldiers between 
bugle-calls. As prudence had been converted into truth, 
courage, and love, so heroism is oddly, almost quaintly, 
identified with virtues so seemingly alien as temperance 
and even hospitality. These are not the things that 
actually count. What coimts is the tingling and mettle- 
some quality, the gay insouciance, the fine headiness 
and sparkle of the new-broached virtue, the spirit of the 
boy who, first on the ice or first in the swimming-pool, 
calls lustily and mockingly to his tardy companions. 

This heroism is not of the orthodox brand; indeed, a 
good-natured contempt for the orthodox brand as being 
hardly better than the cupidities it restrains is possibly 
the distinctive note. Not that the essay lacks its austere 
moments. It contains that priceless sentence: "It is 
but the other day that the brave Lovejoy gave his 
breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of free 
speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to 
live," — an utterance which, according to George P. 
Bradford, caused some of his friends and sympathizers 



186 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

to feel the "cold shudder which ran through the audi- 
ence at the calm braving of the current opinion." 

"The Over-Soul " is the single essay of Emerson which 
one may safely call eloquent : it shares the claim to that 
praise with two or three of the orations. No less than 
twelve times its subject is compared to water, and the 
discourse would seem to have borrowed a peculiar 
plasticity from that mobile and fluid element. Its plan, 
though not incoherent, is neither very strict nor very 
manifest, but its gliding movement imparts an unusual 
effect of continuity and solidarity. There are few essays 
which tend to globe themselves so completely, few in 
which the whole holds its own so successfully against 
the competition of the parts. 

The ground of this quality is not hard to discover. 
Emerson's exhilarations, though numerous, were as a 
rule insulated and momentary; on this subject he com- 
manded for once a continuity of mood. He speaks better 
here than anywhere else of the divine principle. He 
is not commonly at his best in his celebration of the all- 
embosoming beauty. For instance, when in "Self -Re- 
liance" he tells us that "the immortal light, all young 
and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over 
the universe as on the first morning," we are teased by 
a slight sense of excess: we feel that a thousand orbs, 
and — such is our abject state — a dozen colors would 
have satisfied the frugal demands of our pedestrian 
imagination. But in "The Over-Soul " there is no trying, 
no overshooting of the mark; its highly intellectualized 
character, which, in a discourse steeped in rhapsody, 
hardly permits the intrusion of a purely exclamatory 



THE HARVEST 187 

sentence, may be noted as one defence; the gentle and 
even fulness of the sentiment is another. 

A peculiar calm, indeed, is the mark of this essay; its 
very undulations are of the kind that cradle and reas- 
sure. There is a curious fondness for the verb "lie" in a 
vivid metaphorical sense. "The great nature in which 
we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmos- 
phere"; "the background of our being, in which they 
lie"; "we lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual 
nature." There are the marks of the severer Emerson, 
the baffling paradoxes such as the abrogation of time, 
the audacious radicalisms, the austere inhibitions; but 
all are subdued to a rare gentleness. "You are preparing 
with eagerness to go and render a service to which your 
talent and your taste invite you, the love of men and 
the hope of fame. Has it not occurred to you that you 
have no right to go unless you are equally willing to be 
prevented from going? " No man could be more win- 
ningly gentle than Emerson in the enunciation of so 
implacable, so crushing, a demand. One is not sure that 
"The Over-Soul" has not found, in another sentence, 
the tenderest expression for the divine benevolence 
since the Biblical "God is love," and that, too, by an- 
other marvel, in connection with that arctic word, 
being. "His [man's] welfare is dear to the heart of 
being." The universe, under the spell of those fondly 
lingering syllables, becomes almost more than a home; 
it becomes a nest. 

"The Over-Soul," to be fairly judged, must be re- 
ceived for what it is — a rich, poetic transfusion of a 
uniquely high and rare experience. An adequate forti- 



188 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

fication for a creed, or even, by ordinary standards, a 
convenient dwelling-house for a faith, it fails to provide. 

"Circles" is single among the Emersonian essays — 
single in its daring. Brief passages in other essays dare 
as much, but nowhere else is the animating principle of 
a discourse so venturous. We half believe, in reading 
these hardy paragraphs, that yesterday the universe 
was moored, and that this reckless adventurer has 
slipped down under shelter of the night, and cut its 
cable. The "flux" has been much dwelt upon, but one 
doubts if the realization of the plasticity of the universe 
(in distinction from the mere slipperiness of the per- 
sonal life) has ever elsewhere reached the point at- 
tained in "Circles." There is something strange, half- 
Hebraic and half-pagan, in the sternly exultant mood 
in which Emerson watches the emergence of the con- 
suming force: "Beware when the Great God lets loose 
a thinker upon this planet. Then all things are at risk. 
It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great 
city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will 
end." Even the virtues, as we know and conceive them, 
are not fireproof. 

There is no evidence that this transitoriness of the 
virtues was to Emerson much more than an exciting 
possibility, fine hazard or stirring peril, adding the charm 
of romantic vicissitude to the unguessed destinies of 
mankind. For "Circles," with all its intrepidity, is not 
a revolutionary manifesto, nor even a "Marseillaise"; 
it is an attempt to gauge the depth of the universe by 
the rapidity with which it engulfs institutions and be- 
liefs. Emerson was content with his view of the depths: 



THE HARVEST 189 

his generalizations are devastating, but his illustrations 
are relatively mild. The truth is that the sense that 
change is continuous quiets the eagerness for those 
particular changes whose value rests largely on our trust 
in their finality. Radicalism is half destroyed by the 
universalizing of its own principle. 

After that hymn that the morning stars sang to- 
gether, "The Over-Soul," and that bold sortie into the 
undiscovered country called "Circles," the essay on 
"Intellect" can be read with undisturbed serenity. It 
is true that if any one chooses to excite himself over self- 
contradictions, there are provocations enough to make 
him purple in the face, but, to the wiser traveller who 
takes these things in the Emersonian country as he 
would cacti in Texas, the way is attractive, if not 
markedly exciting. The essay shows a common sense 
which in Emerson is almost more notable than genius, 
since genius is too continuous to be distinctive. Having 
dined for a month by the light of the aurora borealis, 
one is half excited by an incidental return to the dis- 
used candle or electric jet. Emerson tells us good, 
shrewd, quiet things which we like none the worse for 
our power to verify them from the stores of our homely 
experience, and which please us more perhaps when 
transferred to our private shelves than when ranged by 
some occult plan in the quaint cabinets of his museum. 

The essay has more of academic gravity and sobriety 
than is commonly found in the volume; only once does 
the sleeping gnome in Emerson wake up and send his 
wilful elfish outcry echoing through the solemn para- 
graphs, ^schylus is still on trial after educating "the 



190 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

learned of Europe for a thousand years. He is now to 
approve himself a master of delight to me also. If he 
cannot do that, all his fame shall avail him nothing 
with me. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand 
i^Eschyluses to my intellectual integrity." With which 
singular mixture of deep sagacity and frolic imperti- 
nence one finds it easy to sympathize. 

In contrast with "Intellect," which discloses a cer- 
tain density, even tightness, of workmanship, the essay 
on "Art," small though it be, impresses us with its 
space and perspective; it has a miniature stateliness, it 
is a peristyle in abridgment. Its principles, which are 
large and many, emerge each beyond the other with a 
movement as rapid as it is unhurried. The utterance 
is relatively free; the stricture in the throat which some- 
times impedes Emerson is taken off, and the voice pours 
out in rounded and untrammelled periods. The thoughts 
are the thoughts of a profound mind restricted in cer- 
tain ways, but no less clearly liberated and furthered in 
others by its ignorance of technique; the only sound 
critic of these principles would be one who brought a 
greater technical intelligence to the support of an equal 
profundity. Emerson views art in relation to the great 
stream of racial life, and studies it at the point where it 
branches from that stream in its first conception in the 
artist's mind and at the point where it rejoins the main 
current in the changes it works in the beholder's spirit. 
It is doubtful whether artists could read the essay on 
"Art" without some internal constrictions, just as it is 
doubtful whether heroes could read the essay on "Hero- 
ism" without biting their lips. It is certain, however. 



I 



THE HARVEST 191 

that Emerson, on subjects a little removed from his own 
specialty, had the art of saying noble things — noble 
whether true or false — which were in the highest degree 
grateful and satisfying to idealists of all classes, even 
the class which recoiled from his cardinal tenets. The 
corollaries of his doctrines endeared him to people who 
shrank from his fundamental propositions. Hence the 
peculiarly sympathetic treatment of topics like books, 
gifts, manners, and domestic life. Of this distinguished 
felicity the first essay on "Art" is the earliest and per- 
haps the most eminent example. 

So closes this remarkable volume — the most re- 
markable possibly that America has produced. Emer- 
son's philosophy is compressed into these few pages — 
indeed, it is all to be distilled from "Self -Reliance,*' 
"Compensation," and "The Over-Soul." Succeeding 
works merely amplify and specify, and in no later work 
or in all together are the principles so completely, 
so compactly, and so forcibly presented. Even in this 
volume, in spite of abundance and compression, rep- 
etition is perceptible: certain leading thoughts reap- 
pear with the sureness with which a great hill or a great 
river reemerges to the eyes of those who walk or drive 
in its proximity. The essays* dispensed a philosophy 
parcel-wise and a temperament piecemeal; they ex- 
hibited a personality strongly marked and somewhat 
variegated, which seemed at times, however, to be noth- 
ing more than the band or girdle around a centre of 
elusive impersonality. Both the thought and the style 
were novel, electrifying, disconcerting; yet they dealt 
with subjects and ends which deprived them of the 



192 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

popular advantages of their qualities. That they should 
be at first to the Jews a stumbling-block and to the 
Greeks foolishness was an issue almost too obvious to 
be deplored: the future hoarded its secure compensa- 
tions. 

The second series of "Essays" (1844) has the mis- 
fortune to be the second; furthermore, it scarcely con- 
tains an essay of value commensurate with any one 
of the five great essays in the initial series; and the 
disposition — the posting in the military sense — of 
its materials hardly favored the instant recognition of 
their value. The first essay, "The Poet," is excellent 
in its well-bred way, but its orthodoxy — that is, its 
Emersonian orthodoxy — is decided; it is hardly a good 
fifer to march at the head of the troop. "Experience," 
which follows, is really a trenchant essay, but its trench- 
ancy is so far disguised that, in the highly respectable 
company of "The Poet" and "Character," another well- 
mannered effort, it passes almost unchallenged. "Man- 
ners" is a dapper, lithe, penetrative piece of work, but 
too slender, too sprayey, to affect the tone of a volume. 
The noble treatment of "Nature" with its symphonic 
overture is perhaps the first essay that stands out with 
independent significance. "Gifts" is gem-like but mi- 
nute: a cabinet hardly counts as a room. "Politics" has 
an agreeable but retiring massiveness, and "Nominalist 
and Realist" and the "New England Reformers " are 
not sufficiently towering to overcome the drawback of 
their position in the rear. For all these reasons, the 
whole volume hardly equals the sum of its parts. 

The essays in this volume scarcely call for minute, 



THE HARVEST 193 

individual criticism; we shall particularize only on the 
two somewhat abnormal discussions entitled "Experi- 
ence" and "Nominalist and Realist." 

"The Poet" and "Character" are reputable and 
mannerly essays; they are repetitions of high mass, so 
to speak, with due pomp, in the Emersonian chapel. 
"Experience," on the contrary, seems one of the boldest 
essays in literature, though its boldness has an almost 
casual air, as if a man should blow up a minster by way 
of correction to the monotony of an evening walk. It 
is a provoking, unsettling, aggressive, half-Mephisto- 
phelean essay; it acts as pry or wedge; it loosens, dis- 
lodges, and upheaves. It shows Emerson's faculty for 
turning his own flank and assailing himself, as it were, 
in the rear; the essay might have been written by a 
critic of Emerson, more alert, more skeptical, and less 
devout. 

The very form of the composition is suggestive. It is 
packed with matter, but it is not air-tight; there are 
spaces which favor respiration. It has an undeniable 
plan, a plan of which you may list or count the segments, 
a plan which the rhetorician may admit, though it 
leave the mere reasoner a little dubious and inquisitive. 
The movement again has a free swing, a nonchalant 
eagerness, a careless and virile stride, that differs curi- 
ously from the grave ceremonial pace of the precedent 
and following essays. The sentences are short and im- 
patient; the diction has a premeditated homeliness and 
brusqueness. He quotes the homely proverb, "In for a 
mill, in for a million"; he makes a supposed speaker say, 
"Come out of that"; he hears "the chuckle of the 



194 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

phrenologists'*; when he shall adapt his conversation 
to the shape of heads, the doctors may buy him for a 
cent. 

The teaching is equally pungent. "So much of our 
time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much 
retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius contracts 
itself to a very few hours." Grief is "scene-painting and 
coimterfeit." "What cheer can the religious sentiment 
yield, when that is suspected to be secretly dependent 
on the seasons of the year and the state of the blood.?" 
"I cannot recall any form of man who is not super- 
fluous sometimes." "To fill the hour — that is hap- 
piness; to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repent- 
ance or an approval." "Nature, as we know her, is no 
saint. . . . She comes eating and drinking and sinning. 
Her darlings ... do not come out of the Sunday- 
School, nor weigh their food, nor punctually keep the 
commandments." " The individual is always mistaken." 
"We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we 
call sin in others is experiment for us." These are 
strong doctrines, and when, in the course of his exposi- 
tion, we find Emerson referring to "the dear old spirit- 
ual world and even the dear old devil," we are half ready 
to concede that the establishment of affectionate rela- 
tions with that potentate is only a matter of common 
prudence. 

One or two of these points are strongly modified; one 
or two are liberally interpreted; for all, compensations 
are found. But the essay remains a most striking and 
memorable document; the evasive, temporizing, pre- 
varicative aspects of Nature are grasped with a clear- 



THE HARVEST 195 

ness which would do honor to an agnostic. Equally re- 
markable is the abandonment by the convinced ideal- 
ists of the ordinary supports and resources of idealism, 
after the fashion of the young David rejecting the sword 
and the helmet and conquering the giant with the sling 
and the stones from the brook. The victory is gained in 
the end; idealism is reestablished, but the world in which 
its authority is renewed looks to the common eye like a 
dismantled, almost a dispeopled, universe. Nothing is 
left at last but the subject — the Ego — and the world- 
spirit — the One : and their imion is the sole value in life. 
It is curious that in one part of his essay Emerson tm'Us 
his destroying analysis upon analysis itself; the chemist 
melts up his melting-pot. 

"Nominalist and Realist," with its generalized theme 
and its unpromising title, is a cast from the same mould 
as "Experience." It is a highly intellectualized per- 
formance, one of the wiriest, one of the most restless, 
prehensile, and muscular among the essays in this and 
kindred volumes. Jacob wrestles all night with the 
angel, or rather perhaps with some entity half-demonic, 
some imp of the perverse, and the joy of the encounter is 
evident in the elastic spring and tension of the crisp and 
rapid sentences. Emerson delights to seize the fugitive 
truth in the pincers offered by a pair of contradictions : 
he sympathizes with the wilfulness and recalcitrancy of 
Nature as one takes pleasure in the naughtiness of a 
spirited child. The essay is ably if somewhat bafflingly 
written, and is notable for its own type of epigram, not 
the mere felicity that dazzles or electrifies like "All man- 
kind loves a lover" and "Hitch your wagon to a star"; 



196 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

but the saying that arrests the truthseeker by its power 
of checking itself at the very point where the com- 
mon epigram plunges recklessly ahead. . "Every man is 
wanted, and no man is wanted much." "I am always 
insincere, as always knowing there are other moods." 
"Is it that every man believes every other to be an 
incurable partialist, and himself a universalist? " Then 
he frees his mind in a passage that in its acid sweetness 
amusingly and yet instructively illustrates the difficulty 
Emerson had in thinking with his fellow-men even when 
he thought as they did: "I talked yesterday with a pair 
of philosophers: I endeavored to show my good men 
that I liked everything by turns and nothing long; that 
I loved the centre, but doated on the superficies; that I 
loved man, if men seemed to me mice and rats; that 
I revered saints, but woke up glad that the old pagan 
world stood its ground and died hard; that I was glad 
of men of every gift and nobility, but would not live in 
their arms." 

"Representative Men," published January 1, 1850, 
was the expansion of a course of lectures delivered before 
the Manchester Athenaeum in England. The volume 
comprises seven lectures, one prefatory and general on 
the "Uses of Great Men"; the other six dealing with 
Plato (the philosopher), Swedenborg (the mystic), 
Montaigne (the^sce^tic), Shakespeare (the poet). Napo- 
leon (the man of the world), and Goethe (the writer). 
Even this briefest of summaries suggests two or three 
interesting facts: that the "representative men," a 
phrase of which, in this special application, Emerson 
is said to be the originator, represent rather tendencies 



THE HARVEST 197 

than multitudes; that the concreteness is — for Emer- 
son — marked; that the variety, ranging from Plato to 
Bonaparte, is considerable. A shrewd observer, conver- 
sant with Emerson, might divine possibly the method 
from the titles: he might conclude that each man would 
be promptly identified with some attitude or aspect of 
human nature; that he would fall heir forthwith to the 
glories and the responsibilities of that function; that his 
inheritance of these glories would insure him many 
paragraphs of rapturous encomium; and that his in- 
adequacy to those responsibilities would expose him 
finally to sharp deductions, almost to reproaches. The 
observer might note again with interest that while care- 
ful distinction is made between two such cognate func- 
tions as those of poet and writer, the saint and the 
prophet are either entirely left out, or are huddled 
loosely together under the insufficient label of mystic. 
His surprise at finding the man of the world admitted 
to this Olympian conclave will be removed by the later 
discovery that man of the world means nothing more 
than the efficient man, the man of action. 

The first lecture in the volume, "Uses of Great Men," 
proves that really vigorous parts may produce a some- 
what languid whole. The work lacks, not momentum 
precisely, but impulsiveness; it is level, level on a high 
altitude, even, dignified, intellectual, possibly a little 
massive. The marshalling of the topics is not unskilful 
for a man who, in this field, ranks only with the cap- 
tains of militia, but the want of superficial continuity, 
of facile and lucid transitions, is felt with exceptional 
keenness in some parts of this discourse. In the keen- 



198 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

ness of its use of facts, it shows unusual afl^ities with 
everyday life. 

The discontent of Carlyle with the lecture on Plato 
has been echoed by later commentators, but to our 
mind it remains secure of its lofty place among Emer- 
son's notable and masterly expositions. The breadth, 
the reach, of the impressions it makes is by no means 
its least memorable trait; Emerson's manner is ordi- 
narily too crenelated with rhetorical cusps and spires, 
too much broken up into jutty, frieze, buttress, and 
coign of vantage to lend itself to those effects of simple 
amplitude which Ruskin praised so cordially in archi- 
tecture. In the "Plato," however, the magnitudes are 
discernible, and the restfulness which is the accompani- 
ment of space is felt everywhere in the majestic treatise. 
The whole lecture is composed with a gusto that seems 
a little short of incredible in view of the temporal re- 
moteness and the philosophic abstractness of its theme. 
The chord that dominates in this work as in the lecture 
on Shakespeare is the chord of exultation. The praise 
of Emerson is tidal; its sympathy is prodigal, its rejoic- 
ing is boundless; it is content, for the moment at least, 
to plunder the universe if by so doing it can enrich its 
idol with a new trophy. Yet, even in this luxury of self- 
surrender, Emerson, in whom the reappearance of criti- 
cism was inevitable, keeps his head, and surprises us 
anew in the concluding paragraphs by unsuspected 
reservations. 

Emerson's warmth is the more notable that its object 
as drawn in his pages is quite bloodless: he sees only the 
intellectual lineaments of Plato; he is enamored of a 



THE HARVEST 199 

profile. That profile, indeed, had a right to his homage, 
because it was the first illustrious example of that syn- 
thesis which holds in equipoise the One and the Many — 
a synthesis of which the last great exemplar lived in 
Concord and trod the banks of the Musketaquid. Emer- 
son no less than Plato — or, shall we say the Emersonian 
Plato, for people tell us that such a character exists by 
way of supplement to the Platonic Socrates — felt the 
equal attraction, the equal necessity, of a continual pas- 
sage from the circumference to the centre and a no less 
persistent re-passage from the centre to the circumfer- 
fence. Both needed worship, needed play: they found 
their play in the chase of the divine unity from disguise 
to disguise, from fable to fable ; they found worship in 
the moment of recapture. 

The four or five pages devoted to Socrates in this 
lecture prove, more than anything else in this volume, 
more than the Montaigne and the Bonaparte, that 
Emerson could make a racy and vital character-sketch. 
He tingles with delight to find his own moral ideal hous- 
ing itself in the rudest, the savoriest, and the most whim- 
sical of personalities. The ancient particulars seem here 
to rise, for the first time, to their full value, and the 
manner — that of the dispassionate observer, who in- 
spects with a mixture of benevolence and caution the 
oddities of some unclassified echinus or torpedo — is 
chosen with unerring art. The impersonation is so deli- 
cate that the slightest intrusion of his own dialect, as in 
the unlucky phrase, "the tyrannous realist," operates 
as a passing disenchantment. One feels that Emerson 
would not have valued the peculiarities without the 



200 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

soul ("my visor is Philemon's roof; within the house is 
Jove"); but, the soul once assured, every nub and 
crinkle upon the surface become inestimable. 

Most readers will probably agree with Dr. Holmes 
that the lecture on Swedenborg is somewhat uninviting, 
and will fall in with his conjecture that Emerson's nearer 
view of Swedenborg disappointed the forecasts he had 
framed at a distance. Emerson seems to have under- 
taken — perhaps in a measure effected — the rehabili- 
tation of the neglected mystic, but the occasion partakes 
rather of the melancholy of a disinterment than of the 
gladness of a resurrection. One can fancy Swedenborg 
moved to say now and then with Lear: "You do me 
wrong to take me out o' the grave." It is true that 
Emerson sets about his task with plenty of courage; the 
praise is cheerily begun and is gallantly maintained for 
a season; but the critical faculty is soon awake, and the 
havoc it works must have surprised even the operator. 
First, we hear that the great man is diffuse, then that he 
is unbalanced. Our admiration has hardly re-collected 
itself after this blow before it learns that he is pedan- 
tically literal and traditionally Hebraic. We recover 
from this houleversement only to be plunged into new 
stupor by the fact that Swedenborg is morbidly sus- 
picious of intellect and that his fancy is a breeding- 
place of nightmares. An enemy might, perhaps, con- 
tent himself with this measure of castigation, but the 
merciless admirer is still unappeased. Swedenborg's 
universe is now discovered to be tedious and lustreless; 
he has some very wrong notions about sins; he is found 
to have a sad proclivity for the harboring of devils in his 



THE HARVEST 201 

creed; his hypothesis of revelation is viewed with the 
gravest displeasure; and lest, after all this, we should 
be charged with sacrificing truth to tenderness, we will 
say finally that he has no sympathy and is wholly want- 
ing in imagination. 

There are savages who beat their deities; Emerson, 
clearly, is a member of their tribe. 

The lecture shows Emerson's honorable willingness 
to renounce piquancy when his path lies through plain 
facts, and his capacity to touch even the plain fact 
with grace. One loves a rhetorician brave enough to 
forego rhetoric. 

Emerson's sympathy with Swedenborg was grounded 
on the participation of the two men in a few large ideas, 
and there was one point in which the sympathy was 
peculiar. Swedenborg was what Emerson sought for in 
vain among the mystics of past ages and the investiga- 
tors of his own — the subordination of really high sci- 
entific accomplishments to mystical and philosophical 
ends. 

The lecture on Montaigne begins at some distance 
from its subject; it ends also far from him; and Mon- 
taigne, who is fortunately a resourceful personage, is 
left to find such accommodation as he can in the middle. 
The opening paragraphs which sketch and contrast the 
abstractionists and the materialists are highly interest- 
ing, and one notes curiously how much fuller and racier 
is the picture of the materialists (whom Emerson dis- 
dained) than the account of the ideal philosophers. 
Between these two classes Emerson attempts to find 
a middle groimd for the sceptics, with Montaigne as 



202 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

standard-bearer. Whether Montaigne's position on the 
psychological chart is really defined with the exactness 
that Emerson intended is a matter which may itself 
afford play for a little scepticism. The air of precision 
is imposing, but the wary critic will not take the grave 
demureness with which Emerson dangles the footrule 
and poises the scales as conclusive evidence that the 
weighing and measuring have been accurately done. 

We might say, perhaps, that while the intellectual 
locus standi is sufficiently defined, the modus vivendi, the 
actual substance of motive, interest, propulsion, in the 
sceptic's life, is either left undetermined or is identified 
with materialism. If you doubt the worth of sunsets 
and will never act on a doubt, what is left you but to sit 
down and eat your dinner with the avid herd to whom 
the notion of any competition between sunsets and 
roast beef would be unmeaning? It occurs also (as 
Emerson would say) that, while certainties are sub- 
stantial, the idea that well-being is secured by planting 
our feet exclusively on certainties is a supposition, and 
we cannot act on the principle without infringing it. 
A man who assumes nothing assumes the wisdom of 
eschewing assumptions. Emerson is himself fundamen- 
tally no sceptic, and what we criticise here is not his 
final opinion, but the success of his careful attempt to 
give scepticism a tenable basis. 

There follows the account of Montaigne, eight pages 
out of thirty-eight, modest quartering, it must be con- 
ceded, for a man in his own housfe. This description is 
of an unforgettable raciness, and smacks of Montaigne 
himself, except that it has less seK-content and more 



THE HARVEST 203 

crispness. It is clearly not the thinker In Montaigne, — 
if we may separate the thinker from the attitude^ — but 
the whole pmigent and vital personality that attracts 
Emerson. He forgives to Montaigne things that he will 
forgive to no one else: the Gascon was a conformist, 
accepting marriage without inclination and the Cath- 
olic mass without faith; he even touched the acme of 
fatuity by Emersonian standards in talking freely of his 
own diseases. The traits which are common or vulgar in 
a contemporary are in Montaigne only manly refusals 
to be any better than his honest neighbors. 

The extent of Emerson's partiality is hardly explained 
by the known facts. There is, of course, his love of the 
sceptic as the counterpoise to the dogmatist and the 
formalist; there is the relish for unconfessed probity; 
there is the winning combination of warm-bloodedness 
and cool-mindedness in the Frenchman; there is Mon- 
taigne's crisp French and there is Florio's spirited Eng- 
lish; but one feels, at the end of this impressive catalogue, 
that some part of this outflowing homage must be 
charged to idiosyncrasy. The admiration is valuable to 
us, because it constitutes one of the chief saliencies and 
pungencies in the character of Emerson. 

The lecture on "Shakespeare; or. The Poet," which 
follows must be ranked with the noblest eulogies in 
English. Shakespeare is not, indeed, conceived with 
the pith and realism that mark the drawing of Socrates 
and Montaigne; the impression that abides in the mind 
is one of -something ample and godlike, a chivalric mag- 
nificence, a noble and sumptuous liberality. It is a great 
and richly peopled country that we survey, but we sur- 



204 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

vey it from an elevation whence only a few grand fea- 
tures, nobly generalized and tempered by a pervasive 
sense of light and space, are visible to the rapt beholder. 
The freedom of style, so general in "Representative 
Men," reaches its culmination in these flowing pages. 

Some surprises possibly await the reader who at- 
tempts to resolve into its elements the feeling of exalta- 
tion and enrichment with which he reads the last word 
of this inspiring lecture. Turning back to the earlier 
parts, he finds that, out of thirty-one pages devoted to 
so vast a theme as Shakespeare, Emerson has been able 
to spare twelve and a half for the discussion of the 
single topic of technical or surface originality. He finds 
that Emerson is throughout singularly free from the 
pressure of space, unfolding each topic with leisurely 
amplitude. He observes with surprise that the things 
which constitute Shakespeare's chief claim to honor in 
the eye of the public and the critics — his passion or 
tragic force, his humor, and his characterization — 
Emerson forbears to emphasize, forbears almost to men- 
tion; the whole case rests, apparently, on the poetry 
and the wisdom. He feels perhaps that, while the Emer- 
sonian estimate may be correct, it is not quite upheld 
by the Emersonian reasons. The specifiable and distin- 
guishable thoughts are not too plentiful, and the truth 
of some of them is less clear than he could wish. He 
is not sure, for instance, that Shakespeare is the one 
person, in all modern history, known to us; he is dis- 
quieted by the assertion that the dramatic force is 
merely incidental; and he has some "compunctious vis- 
itings " about that aflSrmation of " equality of power in 



THE HARVEST 205 

farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs." As he turns 
the leaves, he notes how rarely his eye is caught by the 
name of a play, and, for all the emphasis on verbal ex- 
pression, he meets only two quotations, one of them 
being the minute phrase "antres vast and desarts idle." 
In other points, the lecture shows both mastery of detail 
and princely affluence of illustration, but all is subordi- 
nated to the tendency to take what might be called the 
planetary view of Shakespeare, to simplify him into an 
integral and mighty orb, serenely luminous on the dis- 
tant horizon. 

The penalty of outgoing expectations is the release of 
expectations that one cannot meet. It is Shakespeare 
who now incurs this penalty. Emerson, having asked 
the world of this enchanter, and (contrary to all pre- 
cedent) got it, proceeds to ask him for the skies, and, 
not getting them, is thrown into profound melancholy. 
Shakespeare is only master of the revels; he is not mys- 
tic and prophet. As Mr. Howells says, one "winces" 
under the severity of this judgment. The reader feels a 
little defrauded; he has perhaps quieted some misgiv- 
ings of his own for the exhilaration of taking part with 
Emerson in this voyage of eulogy, and it is provoking to 
find himself half balked at the last moment by the mis- 
givings of the eulogist. In one respect Emerson was 
more fortunate than his readers. Where praise and 
blame have the same object, they mingle in most men's 
minds; in Emerson's, they flow side by side in uncom- 
mimicating channels. The eulogist is housed with the 
detractor, but knows nothing of his fellow-tenant. 

After every discount has been made, the lecture on 



206 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Shakespeare remains a performance which it would be 
hard to duplicate or to overvalue. 

Napoleon, among his other prodigies, made Emerson 
for an hour or so a popular writer. The lecture on Bona- 
parte is singularly and generally readable, because the 
facts for once get their turn with the coruscations, be- 
cause anecdote, unlike metaphor and epigram, relaxes 
tension at the same time that it affords stimulus, and 
because Emerson here met his readers at a rendezvous 
in their own territory. The picture in certain aspects is 
incomparably vivid, and the selection of efficiency as 
the main feature gives a real originality to a subject 
commonly viewed through a blaze — and of course, 
also, through a smoke — of pyrotechnics. The word 
"glory" scarcely occurs more than once in these pages, 
and the intention in that case is depreciatory. What 
dazzles Emerson is a relatively unpretending thing, — 
the scorn of custom, the exercise of common sense, the 
response to emergency, the simplification of means. It is 
practical intelligence, plain, sheer head-work, that he 
admires: he likes Areola and Ulm and Austerlitz be- 
cause in those encounters the fact was victorious. 

The evidence offered for this proposition is striking; 
indeed, the lecture is a capital example of proof by apt, 
succinct illustration. One is not satisfied, however, with 
the choice of Napoleon as the representative of the fact: 
he is too conceited, too inflated, too tricky; he is half 
charlatan and the fact might be excused for disowning 
its representative. If efficiency is both creative and 
destructive, both upright and perfidious, why choose 
for its exponent a destroyer and a hypocrite? 



THE HARVEST 207 

Emerson, indeed, is far from blind to the defects of 
Napoleon; in fact, he forestalls the rod which his op- 
ponents are ready to apply by performing the flagella- 
tion with the most edifying diligence and heartiness. It 
is excellent strategy — though in Emerson it is not 
strategy but instinct — to silence one's opponents by 
stating their point with an energy that makes their own 
rhetoric both superfluous and feeble. The passage is a 
curious example of the dexterity of Emerson's hero- 
worship in adjusting itself to the straits and hardships 
to which it was reduced by the terrific lucidity of his 
perceptions. The ethical teacher now supervenes and 
adroitly turns to his own account this colossal structure 
which the hero-worshipper has built up, by proving that 
efficiency raised to the highest power cannot elude the 
moral law which holds Waterloos and St. Helenas in 
reserve for the discipline of egotists. The principle is 
lofty and the dexterity of the turn is magnificent, but, 
after all the good comradeship with Napoleon, does not 
this utterance remind us a little of the homiletics ad- 
dressed by Prince Hal, after his accession, to the dis- 
reputable Sir John Falstaff.? 

Holmes writes aptly of the lecture on Goethe: "It 
flows rather languidly, toys with side issues as a stream 
loiters round a nook in its margin, and finds an excuse 
for play in every pebble." It takes Emerson about nine 
pages to arrive within sight of Goethe, and when he 
reaches his hero, an admiring glance and ceremonious 
bow expresses the total of his sensations. Emerson's 
efforts to like Goethe are only half successful; a polite 
host, he has this distinguished foreigner on his hands. 



208 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

and makes the best of him: he remmds us of a certain 
Scotch laird in one of George Macdonald's novels, who 
was consciously anxious to entertain his guest and un- 
consciously anxious to see as little of him as possible. 
No other lecture in the volume is so meagre, no other so 
fluent to so relatively slight purpose. The mere man- 
ner, indeed, has a tranquil, self-respecting suavity sug- 
gestive of Goethe's own style, but there are places where 
Emerson, by unexampled mishap, almost fails in his en- 
deavor to make points. He lingers before "Wilhelm 
Meister," unable to achieve clear utterance. Mephis- 
topheles, however, is handled with characteristic inci- 
siveness. With study, certain values can be extracted 
from the lecture; the genuineness of Goethe (if he was 
genuine) is set in relief by his evident self-pampering. 
Goethe, however, is peculiar in this respect, that none 
of his admirers has the smallest success in defining his 
attraction to people who do not know him, or, knowing 
him, do not feel his charm, and Emerson, who was 
half-hearted about the man, Goethe and half-hearted 
about the class, writer could not be expected to solve a 
problem which had baffled the attempts of enthusiasts. 
"Representative Men" was issued in 1850; six years 
elapsed before the publication of the next prose volume, 
"English Traits." Shortly after his return from Europe, 
Emerson's views of England had been provisionally 
embodied in lectures, but years glided away in the ripen- 
ing and perfecting of "English Traits," a work which 
might seem to have been extemporized in six weeks, 
so closely does it imitate the velocity and impetus of a 
missile. It is a work that tempts one to extend to books 






THE HARVEST 209 

the Emersonian declaration that every man is an im- 
possibility mitil he is born. The author of "Natm-e" 
and the "Essays" had done his best to put himself out 
of the pale of the order of men who write such books as 
"English Traits," yet he was a man born to put the 
world to the inconvenience of revising its classifications. 
Here was the most exacting idealist perhaps who trod 
this planet in the mid-nineteenth century, a man im- 
patient of Shelley, scornful of Dickens, condescending 
to Tennyson, charitable to Wordsworth, and viewing 
the great Carlyle himself with a mixture of love, awe, 
and consternation. He visits England in 1847-^8, Eng- 
land as John Sterling saw it, as Charles Reade saw it, 
as Dickens saw it in the novels published between 1840 
and 1860, as Carlyle saw it in "Past and Present," 
published in 1843, as Thackeray saw it in "Vanity Fair " 
in 1847, the very year of Emerson's arrival, as even the 
basking Tennyson saw it in "Maud," published in 1855. 
He sees Britain partly under the auspices of the ablest, 
the most censorious, and the most desponding of her 
sons; he tests English prosperity in the lanes of Man- 
chester and English reality in the halls of Stafford 
House; and he returns home to publish, after allowing 
his sensations six years to cool, one of the warmest and 
most spontaneous eulogies ever dedicated to one na- 
tion by the citizen of another. There are reservations 
and censiu*es, it is true; but they have no undue weight 
— indeed, they lack even their due weight — in the 
happy aggregate of the final impression. 

Had Emerson measured England by his own stand- 
ards of the desirable in literature, in politics, in morals. 



210 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

and in religion, had lie tried and sentenced results^ the 
tone and effect of the book would have been altogether 
different. Results are normally mean and meagre, even 
when measured by standards that Emerson would have 
put aside as cheap. But if for the deeds of Hercules one 
substitutes his thews, if one passes, not forward to re- 
sults, but backward to capacities, first taking the pre- 
caution to choose a people that is genuinely strong, he 
is liable to no such rigor of disappointment. For capac- 
ity is not a thing whose shortcomings are exposed by the 
precise demands of individual occasions; it chooses, in a 
way, its own weapons, its own tests; its failures in the 
broad survey are unemphatic and the pluses obscure 
even more than they outweigh the minuses. Simplify the 
case a little by applying it to another nation. Test 
modern Germany by its approach to predetermined 
goals in politics, literature, art, science, morals, and its 
insufficiencies would be conspicuous; but view its life 
to-day as a demonstration of national energy, and an 
impressive unification takes place which annuls for the 
moment the sense of shortcoming. i 

It must be remembered that in 1849 Emerson was 
forty-four, an imfaltering, but at this date, an unhur- 
ried, idealist; that his relish of mere power, his respect 
for constitution, was extraordinary; that he loved, in 
his way, the distribution of energy into various planes; 
that he could view the trade and politics of England in 
the same preparatory and symbolic light in which the 
ordinary idealist views the cricketing and wrestling at 
Eton and the boating on the Thames. If the ordinary 
* This passage was written before August, 1914. 



THE HARVEST 211 

idealist could perceive that the trade and politics are 
nothing but a form of cricketing and boating, he could 
view them with the same sense of their disciplinary and 
prophetic character which underlay Emerson's broad- 
minded lenity. 

The attitude just noted — the attitude of the mature 
man on the cricket-field — explains the cordiality of 
"English Traits." There are, of course, many pages of 
qualifications and censure. Even a teacher of rhetoric 
may pardon a lusty young cricketer for his apathy on 
the subject of composition, but the immunity would 
cease the moment he essayed to reveal himself in litera- 
ture. Hence the imperfections of the English in litera- 
ture and religion are handled with the customary rigor; 
on these points Emerson's wants are too well defined to 
be quieted by a mere vague certificate of general ability. 
Men are severe toward attempts in their own specialty, 
and it is noticeable that, while Emerson overrates the 
English in the mass, he is disposed, as Miss Elizabeth 
Luther Gary has remarked, to scant his appreciation of 
their sensitiveness and spirituality. The great religious 
history of the English, the lyric fervors of the Anglo- 
Saxon piety, the minster-building of the Middle Ages, 
the martyrdoms of the sixteenth century, the Puritan- 
ism of the seventeenth, the Methodism of the eighteenth, 
are left untouched or casually fingered, while he de- 
votes himself with almost equal zeal to the lashing of 
their Anglicanism and the celebration of their effi- 
ciency. 

The inequality of attitude is curiously illustrated in 
the two adjacent chapters on "Literature" and the 



212 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

" Times " (the newspaper). Now Emerson valued litera- 
ture and scarcely respected journalism. We might ra- 
tionally expect that the essay on literature would be a 
rhapsody and the essay on the "Times" a castigation. 
But what is the actual result ? Emerson writes a casti- 
gation of literature (the Uterature of his contemporaries 
as distinguished from that of the admired Elizabethans) 
and a rhapsody on the " Times." The later chapter has 
an almost bugle-like enthusiasm; the success and power 
of that journal would seem to be registered in Emerson's 
heartbeats. But what are the methods of this paper, 
according to the evidence of its rapt but candid eulogist? 
Bluffing, time-serving, and truckling — duly and openly 
confessed, but barely audible to ears still resonant with 
the author's panegyrics. 

We turn to the essay on literature. The same man 
who a moment ago admired vigor in journalism almost 
without reference to its aims, now insists that noble 
ends — the loftiest spiritual ends — are the condition 
that makes literature respectable. The vigor which 
insured a pardon to those questionable leader-writers 
in the " Times " shall not serve as a protection to this 
graceless canaille of a Thackeray, Dickens, and Ma- 
caulay. They shall not evade our justice by their probity, 
generosity, and tenderness, or the rest of that clucking 
train of poultry-yard and chimney-corner virtues. Are 
they Platonists.f^ — that is the momentous question. 

The explanation of this surface inconsistency is very 
easy. Emerson's spirituality was fastidious; his love of 
power, on the other hand, was almost indiscriminately 
hospitable. Everything, therefore, depended on whether 



THE HARVEST 213 

a given fact classified itself in his mind as an essay in 
spirituality or as a manifestation of power. 

In spite of the presence, in "English Traits," of a 
great enthusiasm and a large disappointment, which 
have never come to any mutual understanding or ad- 
justment of claims, the work in its totality seems unified 
and concentrated. It is, indeed, the luckiest, though 
not the greatest, of Emerson's productions. A subject 
which commanded universal interest was treated from 
a point of view with which every one could sympathize 
and embodied in language that every one, or nearly 
every one, could understand. Now and then a confusion 
arises from the simultaneous pursuit of two or three 
lines of exposition without forethought as to the place 
or mode of intersection. A singular instance of this 
placid entertainment of seeming incongruities is found 
in the attractive chapter on "Manners." On page 104, 
the Englishman's "vivacity" betrays itself at all points; 
by page 112, he has acquired "cold, repressive man- 
ners." On the same page 112, England is "mediocrity 
intrenched and consolidated," but let the admirer not 
lose hope, for on page 114, her bon-mots are as good as 
the French. On page 104, the Englishman "speaks with 
all his body," but by page 112 he has reached the point 
of requiring "a tone of voice that excites no attention 
in the room." On page 105, eccentricity is freely al- 
lowed, but this lawlessness of page 105 is rebuked by 
page 112, which declares that "a severe decorum rules 
the court and the cottage." On page 105, an English- 
man is licensed " to wear a wig, or a shawl, or a saddle," 
but the privilege is withdrawn on page 107 to make 



214 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

way for "a certain order and complete propriety" in 
dress. 

We smile at these inconsistencies, reserving, perhaps, 
a fraction of the smile for the logicians who receive them 
with undue solemnity. A liberal and candid mind can 
well imagine that all these things may be true, and if 
the mode of presentation is confusing, that may be a 
point the less of resemblance to literature, but also a 
point the more of congruity with life. 

Another sort of difficulty is shown in the interesting 
but involved and proportionless chapter on "Race." 
The Celt is disposed of in a scant paragraph, thrust into 
a corner like his race. The Norman overbears the Saxon 
as at a new Hastings, and there is a silent mixture of the 
two races in a fashion consonant with English history. 

Mr. J. J. Chapman, author of one of the ablest critical 
estimates of Emerson, declares "English Traits" to be 
his "ruddiest" book. A different adjective — the most 
impetuous, perhaps, or the most electrical — might 
have seemed preferable to other minds, but of the reality 
of the merit thus variously indicated there can be no 
question. At fifty- three, an author's style may be still 
mobile, but it rarely moves in the direction of impetus 
and vigor; Emerson, more serious in earlier volumes, 
had never been so eager or alert. What he said of Eng- 
land, that it was well packed and well saved, may be 
said of his book. Emerson could always pack, but in 
"English Traits" the facts to be grouped were homo- 
geneous and adaptable, and the total result showed not 
merely compression but rare suppleness and elasticity. 
These are marching, they are almost racing, sentences; 



THE HARVEST 215 

there is an effect of high pressure, rising sometimes, as 
in the chapter on "Truth," almost to overcharge. 

"English Traits" ranks high among the works of its 
author and among treatments of its subject. As a piece 
of craftsmanship, as an adaptation of means to ends, it 
is first among the achievements of a man who was prone 
to give too much or too little or too much and too little, 
and was rarely content with just enough. It is peculiar 
among Emerson's works in its relative suppression of 
peculiarity, and is therefore, of all his books, the least 
eccentric in relation to literature at large. To sum up, 
the claims of the work are high; it is the seizure of a 
strong fact by a strong mind, with adequate sympathy. 

The "Conduct of Life," a series of essays, appeared in 
1860. It was based on a course of lectures originally 
delivered in Pittsburg, in March, 1851, afterwards re- 
peated in Boston, and slowly digested and matured 
between platform and study. 

In the "Essays," particularly in the first series, 
Emerson had sketched, though he had not formulated, 
a constitution for that tottering little republic, the in- 
dividual soul. In the "Conduct of Life" he passed from 
the constitution to the administration of that organism; 
he saw its principles in the light of practice. Yesterday 
we chose between Athens and Samarcand as the goal of 
our journey; to-day we must pack our trunk; enough if 
white columns and palms are glimpsed vision-wise here 
and there through the rifts in the preparation. There 
is — in a high Emersonian version or paraphrase, of 
course — a plain effect of "settling down to business"; 
we are brisk enough; we are cheerful enough; but the 



216 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

day's work with its responsibilities and vetoes is under 
way. The paragraphs, taken as wholes, have a solidity, 
tenacity, and soberness hardly found in the paragraphs 
of the earlier volumes; as blocks, they are a trifle aus- 
tere; they must be pulverized before they coruscate. 
There is greater evenness of tone, which ought to be an 
artistic help by the subduing of disparities into conso- 
nance: in point of fact, one misses the sprightliness of 
change. 

Emerson's central attitude is still strongly personal 
and subjective; but the frequent resort to facts — even 
to the impersonal facts one procures from conversation 
and books, from the file of newspapers and the budget 
of statistics — gives an appearance — a wash^ so to 
speak — of objectivity to the work. The first personal 
pronoun — in Emerson never riotously personal — is 
less noticeable in the "Conduct of Life." We had the 
curiosity to open the book eight times at random to give 
precision to our notion of the kind of topic prevalent in 
these essays. The list is as follows: First, the man who 
knows men is competent on all topics; second, a bad 
institution takes worth out of your dollar; third, Ameri- 
cans have, not water on the brain, but a little gas; fourth, 
the drawing-room is unfit for earnest minds; fifth, noth- 
ing is impenetrable to gossip; sixth, the last lesson of 
life is voluntary obedience or necessitated freedom; 
seventh, a fool or fanatic can derange a whole household; 
eighth, the Mammoth Cave mimics the firmament in its 
"Star-Chamber." This is not low ground assuredly, 
but shelving ground with the greater expansiveness on 
the lower ledges. 



THE HARVEST 217 

It should be remembered that Emerson had now 
reached his fifth decade, a time of life when facts are 
prone to be importunate, that his children were reaching 
ages which deepen the interest of parents in environ- 
ment, that his visit to Europe had been a plunge into 
actuality, that America and its problems had never so 
pierced his tranquillity as in the fateful and stormy dec- 
ade between 1850 and 1860. It should also be remem- 
bered that the book retracts nothing; the old idealisms 
are steadily maintained, or held, rather, in the proud 
negligence of security. There are no retreats; there are 
only inclusions. One trait in the volume is a little sur- 
prising to us. With its rich freightage of facts, with 
the author's matchless felicity in the illumination of 
materialities, with its occupancy, in good measure, of 
ground common to Emerson and the wiser public, one 
might have prophesied an approach to the genial and 
popular character of "English Traits." For its failure 
to attain this quality, three reasons may be modestly 
suggested: the facts, clear-cut as they are, are beaded 
on abstractions, fate, power, culture, illusions, which 
are even more imponderable than self-reliance, com- 
pensation, love, and friendship; the optimism is daring 
to the point of hazarding its own safety; and the book 
fell in the middle zone of Emerson's career where it 
missed both the rapt, clear glow of young enthusiasm 
in the earlier essays and the gracious refulgence of his 
ripened age. 

In the remarkable essay entitled "Fate," by a curi- 
ous novelty of definition, whatever is friendly to spirit- 
ual growth — even though indirectly and remotely — , 



218 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

is listed under freedom; whatever opposes or confines 
that growth is classed as fate. It is chiefly interesting 
by the extraordinary avidity and pungency with which 
the forces that oppose liberty — cataclysm, environ- 
ment, organization, heredity — are collected and pre- 
sented by their intrepid and magnanimous opponent. 
So might Herodotus, secure of Salamis, gloat over the 
number and diversity of the barbaric tribes assembled 
by Xerxes iq the memorable bay. The language, a 
trifle wilful, even, if one chooses, a little madcap and 
impish in its superlatives, is of a strange vividness, 
audacity, and expressiveness. It affects the mind some- 
times with a mixture of admiration and dismay. 

The essay on "Power," a shorter, lighter, less strik- 
ing, and more readable performance, shows a character- 
istic liking for Andrew Jackson, for autocrats, almost, 
indeed, for blackguards and hbertines. The highway- 
man, as we remember, is not expressly endorsed, and 
the canonization of the pirate is left to the iuference of 
the more masculine readers. Emerson, sitting ia his 
fireproof universe, admires the activity of the torch- 
bearer and fire-kiudlers. The common man's morals 
unfortunately are not lined with asbestos. 

Readers conversant with the light, free-hearted way 
in which Emerson is wont to approach the little pas- 
times of agriculture and gayeties of commerce might 
anticipate much from the essay on "Wealth." Those 
expectations are partly disappointed by the ambigu- 
ity of the plan and the large and casual promiscuity 
of topics. For Dr. Holmes, the essay is Franklinesque, 
but one doubts if Franklin would have recognized his 



THE HARVEST 219 

shrewd self in its affirmations. The essay is almost too 
clever to be shrewd. It is half of shrewdness not to be 
too clever. 

Of the essay on "Culture" it may be briefly said that 
its truth is in the main incontestable, that its sense and 
penetration are noteworthy, and that it contains many 
well-put things on a general ground that is somewhat 
colorless and unexciting. With the exception of two or 
three large suggestions in the closing paragraphs, the 
essay is busy, nimble, watchful, birdlike, hopping briskly 
from topic, and deftly picking up many scattered crumbs 
of observation. 

That mysticism is "commanding" in the sense in 
which a stronghold or a peak commands the lower land- 
scape is indicated by the sureness and keenness of the 
judgments of character in "Behavior." Off the tripod, 
Emerson is seen by all to be an oracle. The observation 
is of the best sort, that which is applied or assimilated, 
converted into tissue on the spot — the blackberry 
eaten as soon as plucked. Emerson as reporter is charm- 
ing, and each fact exhales a satisfying philosophy. 

"Some of my friends," so begins the essay on "Wor- 
ship," "have complained . . . that we discussed Fate, 
Power, and Wealth on too low a platform; gave too 
much line to the evil spirit of the times; too many cakes 
to Cerberus; that we ran Cudworth's risk of making, by 
excess of candor, the argument of atheism so strong that 
he could not answer it." He then proceeds, with a sin- 
cerity and a suavity that charm while they provoke us, 
to prove how completely at ease he finds himself upon 
I these matters; as if, forsooth, it were about his safety 



220 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

that we were worrying. Let Orpheus traverse hell, if 
he so chooses. Who gave us a lyre wherewith to charm 
the monster? "I dip my pen," he says, in a delightful 
sentence, "in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid 
of falling into my inkpot." We anticipate a counterblast 
to the negations, but no, we are shortly served with a 
diatribe on the faithlessness and godlessness of our own 
time, in which the iconoclasm and the energy of the 
sinning essays on Fate, Power, and the like are only too 
faithfully reproduced. Cerberus has had another cake: 
one begins to fear that the surliness of that ill-condi- 
tioned animal may speedily be augmented by dyspepsia. 

Does Emerson finally succeed in writing the lofty 
chant which the opening of the essay had foreshadowed? 
Yes and No. There are lofty notes, but they are inter- 
mixed with many matters on a lower level — things 
mostly sane and true, no doubt, but fitted to instruct 
or supplement or illustrate rather than to convince or 
inspire. "Worship" is no second "Over-Soul," yet it 
ranks with those essays which the admirers of Emerson 
could ill spare. 

"Considerations by the Way" need not detain us; 
it is chiefly distinguishable by its unlucky title which 
justly reflects the promiscuity of its contents. 

"Beauty" is a close-packed, highly intellectual essay, 
offering so many clarifying suggestions and explana- 
tions that we are a little embarrassed by the very abun- 
dance of our helps. Emerson's "beauty" is dynamic, 
intensely and variously active; and its nature seems, on 
all sides, copiously referential and associative. It is re- 
lated to intellect as manifestation and bait; it is organic. 



THE HARVEST 221 

a consequence of health; it is necessary, the product 
of use; it is inseparable from grace; it is concerned with 
expression; it is ancillary to character; in sum and lastly, 
it expresses the cosmic and the divine. Indeed, between 
its causes, its transformations, and its fluidity the no- 
tion of beauty wavers a little to our eyes. We are con- 
fused, in finding the man, by the very multitude of the 
addresses. This plasticity, however, this mobility, this 
disengaged and uncommitted character which attends 
beauty through its multiplied fellowships and affinities, 
is exactly what appealed to Emerson; he loved definition 
but he hated finality. 

"Illusions," the final essay, is a remarkable and curi- 
ous performance. It has a powerful and penetrating 
suggestiveness, breeding, by its startling hints and 
glimpses, a passing terror of Emerson, correspondent to 
our terror of the unknown imiverse. We have a haM- 
exhilarated sense of the practice of espionage on the 
Almighty, of laying our ear, at Emerson's bidding, to 
the keyhole of the council-room of God. The tragic 
solemnity which might have ensued has been prevented 
or diminished by the adoption of a treatment, which is 
relatively, to the subject at least, tentative, easy, and 
enlivening. This alleviative procedure awakens a some- 
what qualified gratitude, the gratitude of those who 
have been spared a pang but denied a sensation. 

The placidity and mellowness of the period between 
the close of the Civil War and the beginnings of decline 
is reflected in the volume of essays published in 1870 
under the leisurely and comfortable title, "Society and 
Solitude." They are the cheeriest of Emerson's essays. 



222 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

bearing the same relation to the "First Series" that 
Maeterlinck's "Double Garden" bears to the "Treasure 
of the Humble." It is still Sunday, no doubt, but it is 
Simday afternoon. Many of the titles, "Civilization," 
"Art," "Eloquence," "Domestic Life," "Farmmg," 
"Books," "Clubs," suggest the author's engagement 
with the solaces and commodities of life. In "Domestic 
Life" and "Farming" we find ourselves in the placid 
lowlands. There is a falling-off in impetus. The earlier 
essays breathed the urgency of the aroused propagandist; 
in the "Conduct of Life" the excitement of throwing 
cakes to Cerberus kept the style alert and zestful. But 
in "Society and Solitude," a point has been reached 
where all the ideas of first-rate importance to Emerson 
are restatements, and hence, of course, where the novel- 
ties are all subsidiary. This need not have detracted 
from the charm or even the utility of the work, for 
Emerson's practice confirms the conjecture that the 
direct rays of spirituality are sometimes less effective 
than the reflection of its beams from neutral objects : the 
minister softens more hearts in the church vestibule than 
in the pulpit. But one result is unavoidable, a slack- 
ening of tension. "Society and Solitude" has less mo- 
mentum than the earlier works. 

The initial essay, "Society and Solitude," which sup- 
pKes a title for the volume, "Civilization," "Farming," 
"Success," and "Old Age" fall naturally together into 
a little group of care-free, friendly, genial essays, lean- 
ing to pithiness, to famiHarity, sometimes to boyishness. 
"Books " has a richer aroma, but shares with the quintet 
just specified a briskness that passes at a touch into 



THE HARVEST 223 

gayety. Emerson runs down the centuries like a boy by 
the side of a fence, touching every post blithely. Still 
very fond of books, he has reached a point where he 
takes his ease in their society, and is quite as much in- 
dulgent as respectful. "Domestic Life" is chiefly nota- 
ble for two admired descriptions, both redolent of auto- 
biography and domesticity, the one dedicated to babies, 
the other to the growing lads of a needy family. The 
circumspection — shall we say the tiptoeing? — of the 
pleased father in the earlier sketch is racily comic, and, 
in the second picture, the eager, shy, compressed, half- 
furtive life of Emerson and his brothers is drawn with 
a vividness that reveals both the beauty and the peril 
of that high-strung, generous boyhood. 

"Clubs" is easily forgettable. "Eloquence" has a 
kind of dishevelled opulence. "Courage" is the one 
essay of heroic carriage in this amicable and gracious 
volume, and one is glad to see Capulet rushing once more 
into the street in his gown, and crying out: "What noise 
is this? Give me my long sword, ho!" "Art," opening 
with a bold, broad, loose, and yet striking definition of 
its subject, proceeds to surprise us with something very 
like a consistent defence of a formal thesis. The middle 
part of "Works and Days" — one is tempted to say — 
excels in free, happy lyricism everything since "Beauty " 
and " Illusions " — everything perhaps since " The Over- 
Soul." 

"Letters and Social Aims," as a whole, repeats the 
neutrality of subject, the geniality of tone, and the want 
of novelty in thought, which was noted in "Society and 
Solitude," and the laxity in structure has become more 



224 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

noticeable. A certain leanness or poverty is discernible 
in "Persian Poetry," in the "Progress of Culture," and 
in "Social Aims"; and "Resources" is only saved from 
a like condemnation by a conclusion in the author's high- 
est key. "Greatness," "Inspiration," and "Eloquence" 
constitute a second, somewhat higher, range of essay in 
which agreeableness of a quite authentic brand must 
serve as substitute for power. Better yet, perhaps, but 
better in the same vein, are "Quotation and Original- 
ity" and the longer treatise on "Poetry and Imagina- 
tion." The former is genial, hospitable, pithy; in the 
latter, we find Emerson on his own estate, or, more than 
that, in his own orchard and conservatory. The struc- 
ture is of the familiar looseness which we have learned 
by this time to recognize affectionately as we might the 
flying hair or twisted neckcloth of some near relative. 

There remain two essays of moment, "The Comic" 
and "Immortality." The first of these, though falling 
short of adequacy both in solutions and questions, is 
penetrative, tactical, and prolific in suggestions. Emer- 
son's interest in the theme is readily explicable. Humor, 
indeed, should grow with moral ascension. Man sees the 
joke that is pointless to the animal, because man lives 
on several planes, the animal on one. Lift up the man, 
multiply the planes, produce an Emerson, and the room 
for difference, for the criticism of one estimate by its 
successor and superior, is correspondingly enlarged. 
''Immortality" oscillates between Emerson's two dis- 
positions in this matter, the disposition to affirm the 
fact and the disposition to waive the topic as prying and 
impertinent. He offers depth of consciousness as a sub- 



THE HARVEST 225 

stitute for immortality, but has moods in which he him- 
self questions the desirability of the exchange. That the 
profoundest consciousness of our time was divided be- 
tween the prevision of immortality and the disdain of 
it is the most useful datum obtainable from the essay. 

Our critique of "Lectures and Biographical Sketches" 
(published after Emerson's death) may confine itself to 
the matter indicated by the second element in the title. 
In "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," 
Emerson dispenses his ambrosial substitute for gossip 
in a commemorative feast in which varied and rapid 
courses uphold the fame of the cuisine; the close of the 
book contains sketches of Ezra Ripley (Emerson's 
grandfather by marriage), Samuel Hoar, George L. 
Stearns, Mary Moody Emerson, Carlyle, and Thoreau. 
Three traits may be noted in these sketches : first, Emer- 
son's insatiable relish for humanity; second, his power 
to associate blame and praise without blending them — 
namely, without tempering the effect of the praise; 
third, the tendency to be clearer in the portrayal of high- 
minded conventionalists like Dr. Ripley and Mr. Hoar 
than in that of natures more consonant with his own, such 
as Thoreau and his memorable aunt. As for the " Car- 
lyle," it is vigor etched in vigor — a shaggy son of Anak 
done to the life by an imagination half daimted but 
wholly kindled by the splendid barbarism of its theme. 

"The Natural History of Intellect," the short treatise 
from which the third of the posthumous volumes de- 
rives its title, is a novel experiment. It is Emerson's own 
attempt to give quasi-formal expression to his psy- 
chology; and it is an attempt of Harvard College to 



226 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



1 



obey Emerson's own counsel to bring the man of direct 
vision into contact with its students. Neither the re- 
ports of the day nor the printed version of the Harvard 
lectures of 1870-71 justify us in concluding that either 
attempt was highly successful. Even the pacific Mr. 
Cabot becomes controversial as to Emerson's handling 
of his theme, and the seeker for criticism is referred to 
those pages of the "Memoir" (633-43), in which a "soft 
pounding" is administered to the sage by his loyal bio- 
grapher. A certain tranquillity in Harvard's reception 
of these courses is not to be listed among the grave sins 
of that not quite blameless institution: the ideas could 
not be new, and, so far as utterance went, the Emerson 
of sixty-eight had a dangerous competitor in the person 
of the Emerson of thirty-five. 

The remainder of the volume is chiefly noteworthy 
for three discreet and not strongly individualized papers 
on "Boston," "Michael Angelo," and "Milton," and 
for a series of reprints from the "Dial," among which 
the penetrating reviews of "Walter Savage Landor" and 
of "Past and Present" will be slow to depart from the 
reader's memory. 



CHAPTER V 

EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 

A GLANCE at Emerson's literary equipment may fitly 
precede a critique of his prose. 

I. CrLTURE 

It is a fashion of late years to speak rather slight- 
ingly of Emerson's scholarship and culture. We deny 
him the general merits, unperturbed by the curiously 
good showing he makes in various particulars. We are 
clear that he was no linguist; in the comfort of which 
persuasion shall we not throw a crumb to his admirers in 
the admission that he knew — sparingly, of course — 
Greek, Latin, ItaKan, German, and French? We are 
cheerfully agreed that his reading was desultory: no 
wise man will be moved by the fact that it was a most 
accommodating desultoriness — a desultoriness so lib- 
eral, indeed, as to permit its possessor to know Shake- 
speare almost by heart, to read Goethe through in the 
original, and to master pretty much all the material 
available in English in a field so abstruse as Neo-Platon- 
ist philosophy. We know that his reading was not cath- 
olic, whatever rash inferences the hasty reader may 
draw from the inclusion of five writers so diverse as 
Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and 
Goethe in the single volume of "Representative Men." 
We repose in his want of scholarship; in view of which 




228 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

the trifling fact that he quoted more freely, more vari- 
ously, and more ably than almost any writer of his time 
may be admitted with a tranquil soul. 

The question of his culture it would be futile to de- 
bate. Where the facts are tolerably clear, and the gen- 
eral term under which it is proposed to group them is 
variously and loosely employed, common sense sug- 
gests the propriety of stating the facts and relinquishing 
the discussion. Most men would probably agree that the 
essence of culture is appreciativeness — appreciative- 
ness of the finer values, aesthetic, intellectual, spiritual. 
That some catholicity and some discrimination should 
mark this receptiveness would generally be conceded; 
dispute might arise as to the relative weight to be 
ascribed to the three constituents, sesthetic, intellectual, 
and spiritual, and to the three qualities, intensity, 
catholicity, accuracy. We venture to tabulate Emerson's 
receptivities and opacities in two columns : — 

Sensibility Sensibility 

To religious and ethical appeals 
— unsurpassed in quality, in- 
tensity, and range. 

To natural beauty, especially in 
landscape and woman, — very 
great. 

To the arts of poetry and elo- To the arts of painting, sculpture, 
quence — very great. architectiu*e, music, and acting 

To literature — intense, though — weak. 

limited and freakish . To literature — limited and freak- 

To conversation — keen. ish, though intense. 

To science — inexpert but keen. 

To daily practical life — keen. 

This is no discreditable showing. Put Emerson in the 
same scales with even so high an exemplar and exponent 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRrTER 229 

of culture as Matthew Arnold, and the outcome is far 
from ignominious. By the test of such a table Arnold 
would be inferior, though still notable, in ethical and 
religious sensibility, and in responsiveness to natural 
beauty; inferior likewise in response to the higher mean- 
ings of science and daily life. In the plastic arts, music, 
and acting, he would rank, we presume, with Emerson; 
and his superiority would be confined to the catholicity 
and precision — not the intensity — of his reaction to 
literature, including poetry. If scholarship be included 
in culture, Arnold's relative position would be strength- 
ened. 

Let each reader decide for himself whether the pos- 
sessor of the above resources was a cultured man. The 
general feeling will probably be that even a barbarian, 
so endowed, would be enviable. 

II. Criticism 

On the ticklish point of Emerson's literary criticism, 
let us bring together a few of his most damning (some 
writers would say seK-damning) estimates at once. He 
called "Pickwick Papers" the "poor Pickwick stuff." ^ 
He found none of Hawthorne's books "worthy of his 
genius . . . they are too young." ^ "Shelley is never a 
poet. . . . Imagination ... he has not." ^ Miss Austen's 
novels seemed to him "vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic 
invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of 
English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the 
world." ' 

1 Jour. IV, 436. ^ Cabot, i, 377. 

3 Jour. V, 344. * Jour, ix, 336. 



230 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

These judgments may be thought conclusive as to 
their author, and, indeed, they do peremptorily set 
aside his claim to authority in criticism. The case, how- 
ever, will repay a little study. 

Figure to yourself a passion for literature as such, 
an intense preoccupation with spiritual ends, and an 
existing world-literature whose ends are for the most 
part mundane; a great passion crossed and confused 
by a fundamental misunderstanding; and the difficul- 
ties of adequate criticism on Emerson's part become 
clear. 

But if Emerson could extract good from every secular 
fact in life, why could he not turn the images of secular 
facts in literature to the same use? The answer may 
be put thus : the living fact may be insulated, and its 
spirit is, for Emerson, divine; the literary fact is a con- 
stituent of a whole, and the informing spirit is that of 
an author with whom one is likely enough to be dis- 
cordant. 

Emerson put the highest valuation on the momentary, 
isolated experience. A man of this type will love those 
elements of literature which can contract their power 
into a moment. He will value, therefore, the thought in 
its imposing brevity, its crystalline or stellar form, and 
he will love Plato, Bacon, Landor, Coleridge, and Goethe. 
He will value the image, particularly the symbolic image, 
and will take pleasure in Behmen and George Herbert. 
He will value the phrase, especially the imaginatively 
expressive phrase, and his reverence for Shakespeare 
will be boundless. He will value the anecdote as distinct 
from the long narrative, and for this reason (not ex- 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 231 

eluding others) he will go eagerly to Plutarch and 
Montaigne. 

Emerson is sensitive likewise to certain forms of at- 
mosphere and spirit in a work, which, although they 
pervade an entire composition, are capable of expression 
in the single sentence. The two qualities of strongest 
appeal were the religious strain which he found in vari- 
ous bibles, in Plato, in Plotinus, and in Herbert, and 
the strain of racy, masterful, constitutional vigor which 
made him an admirer of Montaigne, of Ben Jonson, of 
the "Biglow Papers," and of "Leaves of Grass." It was 
the good fortune of Carlyle, so far as the holding of 
Emerson's admiration was concerned, to fall into the 
second of these categories in falling out of the first, and 
Emerson showed a real versatility and breadth in adapt- 
ing to the Berserker the homage originally moulded to 
the form of the seer. 

The indifference to novels in conjunction with the 
relish for anecdote sustains the contention of Mr. 
Brownell ^ that he had no feeling for art — that is, for 
the combinations and harmonies of masses — in the 
works of other men. That it was the novel as a genus 
rather than particular authors whom he disliked seems 
pretty well established by his impartial and emphatic 
rejection of three authors so startlingly different as 
Hawthorne, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens. The 
disparity in valuations, which was his chief point of 
estrangement from his fellow-men, came out conspic- 
uously in the novel, with its tireless emphasis on money 
or marriage or physical safety or — what wearied Emer- 
* Brownell, American Prose Masters, 186-87. 



232 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

son almost as much — the stringencies of temptation 
and remorse. It must be granted that when we have 
thus provided him with one of those general incapacities 
which serve — one hardly knows why — as a shelter for 
particular defects, he abuses our kindness in his pre- 
sumptuous interest in Scott. When a man has rejected 
the gun and the fishing-rod as juvenile, he has cut him- 
self off from the public display of his affection for the 
skate or tennis racquet. 

Emerson's fondness for Scott's novels and for Homer's 
poems is partly, perhaps, explicable from boyish asso- 
ciations, partly from the common exhibition by these 
adventurous fictions of three traits to which his response 
was cordial: primitive virility, martial images, and 
courtly, generous manners. His attachment to Shake- 
speare appears to have been quite unrelated to any in- 
terest in drama or narrative : it embraced little more than 
the poetry and the wisdom. His attitude toward his 
beloved poet is peculiar almost to anomaly : he first cuts 
out half the man and then expands the other half to 
make good the difference. 

Did Emerson love poetry as such, apart, let us say, 
from his profound interest in religion and in symbolism? 
Could he delight in pure music, in pure expression, with- 
out a pious afterthought? The afcmative evidence 
seems incontestable. He quoted as an example of ex- 
quisite verse Beaumont and Fletcher's lines on melan- 
choly, "Hence all ye vain delights," ^ a poem surely 
innocent of sanctity. He cites, in illustration of Shake- 
speare's poetic felicity, the equally undidactic lines: — 
1 "Poetry and Imagination," viii, 55. 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 233 

"What may this mean. 
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel 
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon? " ^ 

He quotes with homage Collins's "Bubbling runnels 
joined the sound" and Tennyson's brief phrase, the 
"stammering thunder," ^ passages whose destitution of 
everything but sheer poetry stamps their admirers as 
responsive to the pure cry. That Shelley, who gives us 
what might be called the vapor of landscape, should 
have appealed little to a man who saw nature as if etched 
on steel, is not inexplicable to the discerning, and the 
unlucky description of Dante as "another Zerah Col- 
burn" ^ (a mathematical prodigy) has been caught up 
with an avidity which sober criticism can hardly en- 
dorse. What Emerson meant, and how much else he 
meant, is brought out by a passage in "Poetry and 
Imagination," in which, after exalting the union of 
freedom with precision, he says that "Dante was free 
imagination, — all wings, — yet he wrote like Euclid." ^ 
Emerson was often wrong and often right in his liter- 
ary judgments: when he was wrong, he was sometimes 
laughable; when he was right, he was usually profound. 
Even when he is least judicious, he is often discerning; 
in his sweeping condemnation of Miss Austen, for in- 
stance, he fixes shrewdly on Miss Austen's capital de- 
fect — her narrow, even vulgar, conception of life. An 
authority in criticism — a man, that is, whose opinion 
weighs with us beyond our instinctive perception of its 
Tightness in the particular case — he can never be; but 

1 "Shakspeare," iv, 207. 2 /owr. ix, 209. 

3 Cabot, I, 290. 

* "Poetry and Imagination," viii, 72. 



234 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

a great nature speaking frankly on one of its leading in- 
terests cannot fail to be often wise or to instruct us even 
in its aberrations. 

III. Clearness 

Dr. Garnett writes of the individual sentence in 
Emerson: "His thought is transparent and almost chill- 
ingly clear." ^ For most men, the clarity is hardly of the 
sort that regulates the temperature. It is true, neverthe- 
less, that for Emerson, as for Browning and Meredith, 
around the fact of obscm-ity an illusion of greater ob- 
scurity has grown up. The trouble with Emerson is 
more often strangeness than dimness; the indistinctness 
of the moral Monadnock or Agiochook which he points 
out to us is due rather to the distance of the peak than 
to the haze in the atmosphere. He is less obscure to-day 
because time has shortened the distance. "Self -Reli- 
ance" and "Compensation" have tinctured the air, and 
the study of the parents has borne fruit in the swifter 
intuitions of the children. Fifty years of approach have 
lightened many difficulties, and one reflects curiously 
that fifty years of recession, should they occur, might in- 
volve our grandchildren in the same perplexities which 
befogged our grandsires. 

IV. Coherence 

The articulation of the sentences within the para- 
graph is a point on which the public has been grossly 
misled. Among the grossest of its deceivers is Emerson 
himself whose declaration that each of his sentences was 
1 Garnett, 75. 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 235 

an "infinitely repellent particle" deserves incarcera- 
tion in the same pound with the assertion that he did 
not know what an argument meant. His paragraphs 
will usually bear analysis; they sustain analysis better 
— sometimes — than perusal; and a second reading 
strengthens their coherence. In other words, a distinc- 
tion must be made between the cogency and the trans- 
parency of the sequence; the connection between two 
thoughts is often intimate enough, but the passage as 
Mr. Macy suggests is underground.* 

The absence or rarity of connecting particles in Emer- 
son's style is sometimes rashly assumed to be an evi- 
dence of an equal want of sequence in the thought. But 
here a misunderstanding exists which the citation of 
two passages from Macaulay — a writer of impeccable 
sequence — may aid us to disentangle. The first is from 
the description of the Puritans: ^ — 

"Events which short-sighted politicians ascribed to 
earthly causes, had been ordained on his account. For 
his sake empires had risen, and flourished, and decayed. 
For his sake the Almighty had proclaimed his will by the 
pen of the Evangelist, and the harp of the prophet. He 
has been wrested by no common deliverer from the 
grasp of no common foe. He had been ransomed by the 
sweat of no vulgar agony, by the blood of no earthly 
sacrifice. It was for him that the sun had been darkened, 
that the rocks had been rent, that the dead had risen, 
that all nature had shuddered at the sufferings of her 
expiring God." 

1 Macy, Spirit of Amer. Lit. 70. 

2 Macaulay, Works, i, 255-56. 



236 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

The second passage treats of government in relation 
to the claims of the Jews (connectives miderscored) : ^ 

"7/ it be right that the property of men should be 
protected, and if this can only be done by means of gov- 
ernment, then it must be right that government should 
exist. Now there cannot be government unless some per- 
son or persons possess political power. Therefore it is 
right that some person or persons possess political power. 
That is to say, some person or persons must have a right 
to political power." 

It is clear that the first of these passages is devoid of 
formal articulations, that the second is sown with them 
and profits much by their support, and that, neverthe- 
less, the earlier passage exhibits a solidarity with which 
its successor cannot pretend to compete. If you carry 
irregular or nondescript objects, toys, kitchen utensils, 
pine knots, some kind of external ligature, rope, basket, 
knapsack, becomes indispensable. But if you carry 
planed blocks of equal size, the mere likeness is a sub- 
stitute for cohesion, and the armful is commodious with- 
out aids. 

Now the Emersonian paragraph, without obeying any 
rigid law and with no scant measure of elasticity, tends 
to assume the form of the first citation from Macaulay; 
it tends to furnish several illustrations or several re- 
statements of one law. Hence, to the extent of this 
tendency, the absence of connectives fails to injure 
coherence. 

The prevalent impression that the Emersonian para- 
graph is a dust-heap — gold-dust, indeed, but for all 
1 Macaulay, Works, n, 308. 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 237 

that a heap — is due partly no doubt to the fame of his 
epigrams. It is thoughtlessly assumed that fitness for 
effective detachment must imply as a corollary unfit- 
ness for effective union. But the analogy of matter — 
and of society, also, for that matter — shows that in- 
dependence and adaptiveness (or sociability) are far from 
inconsistent properties. A square or a diamond stands 
out in effective distinctness, when isolated, but it blends 
admirably with figures of its class in a checkerboard, 
a chimney-piece, or a mosaic pavement. Take, for in- 
stance, the apparently abrupt and unaccommodating 
dictum, "Imitation is suicide," and see how deftly it is 
wrought into the solid fabric of a sentence such as this : 
"There is a time in every man's education when he 
arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that 
imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better 
for worse as his portion; that though the wide imiverse 
is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to 
him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground 
which is given to him to till." ^ 

While due allowance, therefore, should be made for 
Emerson's reluctance to advertise — or even sometimes 
to annoimce — the articulation of successive sentences, 
it is time surely to bury the legend that he worked in 
pellicles, that his composition is a fall of snowflakes. The 
whole fascination of life for him lay in the disclosure of 
identity in variety, that is, in the concurrence, the run- 
ning together, of several distinct images or ideas. It 
would be suggestive, and not wholly inaccurate, to aver 
that he thought in paragraphs. 

1 "Self-ReUance," ii, 46. 



238 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

The theory of formlessness in the compositions as a 
whole may be promptly put aside. Those who prefer to 
read Emerson's essays backward may be left without 
question to the unhindered enjoyment of this innocent 
form of calisthenics. But the true critic will perceive 
that method, in some form or degree, is universal in 
Emerson. We should say that his aptitude for method 
was mediocre, permitting him, in lucky subjects and 
genial moods, to approach excellence, and in refractory 
subjects or unruly moods, to sink to the plane of bad- 
ness. At its lowest, however, it is far above chaos. 

On this topic on which honest investigation is as rare as 
loose talk is plentiful, a few specifications will be in place. 

First, the method deteriorates in advancing life. 

Second, the pure or abstract essays are of looser 
fabric than the works strongly tinctured with concrete 
fact or practical import. 

Third, Emerson had a good eye for simple likeness 
and direct contrast. When his matter is capable of sub- 
jection to these obvious principles, his success in or- 
ganization is considerable. 

Fourth, Emerson frequently numbers his points, a 
practice which is thought to be the acme, almost the 
pedantry, of order. 

Fifth, Emerson failed to distinguish sharply between 
related ideas; the same thought sometimes occurs twice 
in one essay,* or two thoughts which are kinsmen and 
should be neighbors are kept apart by comparatively 
alien ideas. ^ 

1 "The Poet," in (two examples). 
' "Character," in (three examples). 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 239 

Sixth, Emerson's wish to get his whole philosophy 
into each essay tended toward sameness and promis- 
cuity at once; it made the essays similar and the fara- 
graphs diverse. 

Seventh, Emerson's feeling for conclusions was 
strong; what he found hard was to make his conclusion 
his stopping-place. Too many essays resemble "Com- 
pensation" in having what might be called recurving 
tips: they end, so to speak, in a footnote.^ 

It may be added, in conclusion, that, in both the 
paragraph and the essay, the order is better than it 
seems to be, and this absence of the look of order must 
be counted as an aesthetic defect. The aesthetic sense 
has more to do with our judgments of the merits of 
plans than we should willingly suppose, and Emerson's 
building, even when sound, rarely produces the effect 
of architecture. 

V. English 

Emerson's relation to the grammar of his native 
tongue may be defined as a constitutional negligence 
superposed upon an inculcated carefulness. He was 
normally a loose writer, who had taken to heart in child- 
hood a stringent tradition. Hence a general effect and 
air of strictness in his work, accompanied by frequent 
occasions when his English — to use a homely term — 
stretches itself. His grammar could imbend at inter- 
vals, as his Puritanism countenanced a rare cigar or 
glass of wine. 

He uses unfamiliar preterites and participles, which 
» "Compensation," ii, 124-27. 



mo RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

are rather antiquated than inaccurate; "sprung" and 
"begun" in the past tense and the once fashionable 
"having drank" and "have rode." ^ Carlyle perhaps is 
responsible for his predilection for quaint comparatives, 
"liker," "perfecter," "easilier," ^ and for matronly and 
buxom superlatives, "subtilest," "cheerfulest," "learn- 
edest," "willingliest." ^ He never hesitates to invest an 
adjective that chances to end in "ly" with all the pre- 
rogatives of an adverb, and uses "orderly" and "mas- 
terly" and even "jolly" as modifiers of verbs with the 
most edifying intrepidity.^ He uses that snare for the 
unwary, the hanging or unattached participle, the parti- 
ciple in disjunction from a noun, with a freedom which 
places him at a bound on a level with the noblest of the 
English classics.^ He disappoints us a little by a pretty 
strict loyalty to the orthodox tradition in the matter of 
"shall" and "will," but regains our regard by an ex- 
plicit, though rare, surrender to the enticements of the 
split infinitive. In the "Journals" we find "to not 
exasperate," and in "Society and Solitude " "to fairly 
disengage." ^ A phrase like "intended to have dis- 
patched this letter"^ awakens in him no debile com- 
punctions, and he writes "thou from speech refrained" ^ 
with the aplomb of the callous transgressor. 

1 " Boston," XII, 209; Jour, vii, 489; Poems, ix, 312; English Traits, 
V, 303. 

2 Jour. IX, 245; "Poetry and Imagination, " vni, 39; Jour, ix, 531. 

3 "Poetry and Imagination," vin, 7; C. E. C. i, 34; "Success," 
vn, 292; "Domestic Life," vii, 109. 

* English Traits, 80; "Courage," vn, 268; English Traits, 70. 
^ " Worship," VI, 233; " Poetry and Imagination," viii, 16; Literary 
Ethics, I, 173. 

6 Jour. IX, 462; " Clubs," vii, 228. 

7 C, E. C. I, 62. 8 Poems, ix, 83. 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 241 

His use of pronouns is untainted by purism. The 
" and which " or " but which " error/ whereby a "which " 
clause or "who" clause is yoked in morganatic connec- 
tion with an unpretending participle or adjective re- 
ceives his unqualified sanction; and the "but I" for 
"but me," in phrases like "which have no watchman, 
or lover, or defender, but I,"^ could not escape his 
patronage. The zealots for "It is I" will read with pain 
the following double-edged solecism in the "Journals": 
"he is me, and I am him." ^ If he disappoints us a little 
by the delicate exactness of some uses of "every," ^ he 
manifests a consoling readiness to use the pronominal 
"either" of three, four, five, six, as many persons as you 
please.^ Give him time — plenty of time — and he will 
even add to each a plural verb: "Each of these are 
free." ^ He clinches his emancipation from rule by the 
following couplet from "The Celestial Love": ^ — 

" There need no vows to bind 
Whom not each other seek, but find." 

There is an unusual idiom of which he is curiously 
fond, "too" in correlation with "than." "The poet 
stands too high than that he should be a partisan.^" 
He uses "not but" pleonastically for "only": "they 
have not but 350 or less pages." ^ Once he even rises to 
the audacious "off of." ^^ 

The reader will bear in mind that these solecisms 

1 "Illusions," VI, 315; "Domestic Life," vii, 120; C. E. C. i, 11. 

2 Jour. VIII, 316; Cabot, i, 350. ^ jo^r. iv, 464. 

* "Napoleon," iv, 227. ^ "Experience," ill, 55. 

^ Jour. IX, 162. ^ Poems, ix, 117. 

8 Jour. IV, 199. 9 C. E. C. i, 224. 
" Jour. VIII, 300. 



k 



242 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

occur rari natantes in the text, and that an aggregation 
like the foregoing unduly magnifies their importance. 
They point significantly, however, to Emerson's native 
insensibility to linguistic or logical precision, a defect 
which his eminent rhetorical precision — the precision 
which sifts words and pares sentences — brings out in 
emphatic relief. 

VI. Diction 

In view of Emerson's predilection for the slang-like, 
— we mean for the homely, the brusque, the metaphori- 
cal, and the exaggerated, — his almost total avoidance 
of slang is an honor to his taste. He seldom admits it 
even in the company of that priceless antiseptic, the 
quotation mark. He hated vulgarity while he loved its 
concomitants. 

Mr. Cabot and Professor Woodberry ^ tell us that he 
was indifferent to the French language and literature, 
but the frequency of French citations in the "Journals" 
and the rather noticeable sprinkling of French words in 
his English would support a quite contrary conjecture. 
He uses words or phrases like politique^ eclat, matSriel, 
bonhomme, homme de lettres, soirSe, aplomb, gai science, 
triste (his adoption of that pinchbeck word is queer), 
convives, naturel, a Voutrance, rencontre, apergu, empres- 
sement, nSant, contretemps, embarras de richesse, peu de 
cas, de rigueur, savoir vivre, savoir parler, chasseur, haute 
volSe, jalouse, la port6e, coup d'oeil. He dignifies his page 
with an occasional Latin phrase, or indulges his ear, 
more rarely, with some flute-like vocable from Italy. 
» Cabot, I, 290; Woodberry, 85. 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRrTER US 

The single German word recorded in our notebook is 
Meinstadlich. 

He has a relish for unfamiliar words, words of recent 
coinage or of his own make, or that closely similar type 
of words to which age has brought a second childhood. 
One regrets his countenance of new words ending in 
"ize" — a suffix which with its graceless kindred "ist," 
"ism," deserves to be paralleled with Attila and Alaric, 
Genseric and Rollo, and other captains of hordes of 
invading barbarians — or barbarisms, at the reader's 
pleasure. Emerson uses "Copernicize," "rhetoricize," 
"anthropize," "contemporize," and even, to the final 
overturn of one's nerves, "apathize." He does not shrink 
from "analogizing," as these examples prove, and ven- 
tures once upon "gigantizing." After this, "Birming- 
hamize" will be a mere peccadillo, and a fondness for 
the prefix "dis," shown in "disentitle" and "disim- 
agine," will unite with his partiality for "ize" to pro- 
duce the impressive compound, "disindividualize." 
"Ize," of course, debouches into "ization," and we 
have "Africanization," which is pardonable, and " Jona- 
thanization" (Americanization) which is "recommended 
to mercy." There are occasional Grecisms of heavy 
build, — "anthropometer," "dispathy," "lotophag- 
ous"; and there are Latin derivatives, sometimes a 
trifle plethoric, "circumlation," "omnivolence," "plen- 
ipotence," "pleniloquence," "enumerable," "mini- 
minity," "necessitative," "consuetude," "exanimate," 
and "longanimity" (the last two not unusual in litera- 
ture, of course, but curious and characteristic). Other 
Latinisms are of slenderer and more pleasing fabric. 



244 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

"pudency" (dear to Emerson), "impressional," "routi- 
nary," "reverable," "aversation," "intensate," "edi- 
ficant." One could spare "opprobriate" and "jeopard- 
ous," and "the tempers of angels" would be disturbed 
by "scribaceousness." 

There is a class of homely improvisations which are 
sometimes attractive if the usage is solitary. "Selfism" 
is pedantic and "prigism" is cumbrous, but "fromness" 
is happily pictorial, and "otherest," in the sense of 
" most different," is a godsend. " Hasters " and " seemer" 
(one who seems) may be received with tempered grati- 
tude, but "framable" is, or might be, useful, and "bug- 
dom" and "flydom" are delectable inventions. To 
"ungod" is a term that throws one into consternation; 
it seems born of the Promethean Caucasus or of the 
Satanic (and Miltonic) Inferno. 

Rarely a word is found of vulgar or flaunting con- 
notations; "negrofine" is oleaginous, and "recentness" 
has the smartness and cheapness of fresh paint. The 
word "daguerred" (photographed) seems not so much 
up to date as in advance of date. 

Emerson's position, in diction as in grammar, may 
be described as license invading scrupulosity, or, if one 
pleases, conscientiousness in the earliest stage of dis- 
integration. 

VII. Unbeistdings 

That Emerson's language is a rare composite has been 
pretty well recognized since Lowell penned the corus- 
cating sentence: "A diction at once so rich and so 
homely as his I know not where to match in these days 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 245 

of writing by the page; it is like homespun cloth-of- 
gold." ^ It is doubtful, however, if the extent to which 
the plebs in vocabulary as distinguished from the mob 
penetrates the diction of Emerson has been yet realized 
by the critical public. The point will justify illustra- 
tion. 

A word is "plain" when it names an ordinary fact 
unpretendingly; it is "homely" when the fact or word 
has distinctly lost elegance; it is "familiar" when 
freely used by everyday mouths; it is "coarse" when it 
names unpleasant things, and, in the growth of this 
quality, it becomes "disgusting"; it is "brusque" when 
it becomes vigorous and unfeeling, and, when these 
qualities strengthen, it is called "rough"; it is "con- 
temptuous" when the wish to degrade the object is 
strong; and when excitement is added to contempt, it 
becomes "violent." "Wheelbarrow" is a plain word; 
"kettle" is both plain and homely; "off and on" is 
familiar; "stomachache" is coarse; "vomit" is disgust- 
ing; "dunce" is brusque, and "blockhead" is "rough"; 
"snivelling" is contemptuous, and "damnable" is vio- 
lent. It can be shown by examples that Emerson's dic- 
tion displays all these attributes in turn; it would be 
folly and injustice to affirm that any of them is its 
staple or abiding characteristic. 

The plainness may be illustrated from "Wealth." 
"Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and 
wind out; in a good pump that yields plenty of sweet 
water; in two suits of clothes, so to change your dress 
when you are wet; in dry sticks to burn, in a good 
1 Lowell, Prose Works, i, 351. 



246 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

double- wick lamp, and three meals." ^ When Emerson 
says that an Englishman must be served " with muffins, 
and not the promise of muffins" ; ^ when he calls Brook 
Farm "an Age of Reason in a patty-pan"; ^ when he 
says that Homer and Milton may become tin pans;^ 
when he tells us not to "fag in paltry works which serve 
our pot and bag alone"; ^ when he calls man's operations 
on the earth only a "little clipping, baking, patching, 
and washing," ^ he adds homeliness to plainness. 

He is familiar, again, when he says that electricity 
would take a message "just as lief as not"; "would 
carry it in no time";^ when he says that people have 
to get "washed, clothed and set up on end"; ^ when he 
calls the English sailor "Jack" ^ and the Irish- American 
laborer "Paddy"; ^^ when his seK-reliant hoy farms it 
and teams it; ^^ when he declares that "life is a pitching 
of this penny — heads or tails." ^^ 

He is coarse (the word is used here without degrading 
implications) when, in "Worship," he repudiates "emo- 
tion and snuffle"; ^^ when he talks of that "fatty face, 
pig-eye and squat-form"; ^^ when he mentions animals 
that "sweat out" their "slimy house" and others that 
"perspire their bed"; ^^ when he speaks of the "tape- 
worm of Europe"; ^^ when he ends one paragraph with 

1 "Wealth," VI, 87. 2 English Traits, v. 233. 

3 " Life and Letters in New England," x, 364. 

^ "Poetry and Lnagination," viii, 68. 

e "CiviHzation," vii, 30. « "Nature," i, 5. 

^ "Civilization," vn, 28. ^ "Behavior," vi, 172. 

8 English Traits, v, 30. 1° "Uses of Great Men," rv, 30. 

" "Self-Reliance," n, 76. " ''Montaigne," iv, 149. 

" "Worship," VI, 241. " "Fate," vi, 11. 

" "Fate," VI, 41. " "Culture," vi, 145. 



EMERSON AS PROSE- WRITER 247 

"dropsy" and begins the next with a "goitre"; ^ when 
he talks of "snores and gastric noises"; ^ when he 
adverts to the beggar "cracking fleas in the sunshine"; ^ 
when he calls the Fugitive Slave ordinance "A filthy- 
law." * He is disgusting — we do not say unjustifiably 
so, but yet disgusting — when he talks in a letter to 
Carlyle of "putrid black vomit." ^ 

It should be remembered that Emerson in his sporadic 
use of coarse terms was guided by principle. He be- 
lieved that all facts, including repulsive facts, were 
parts of the vocabulary furnished us by Nature, and 
that abstinence from these words would have deprived 
lice and fleas and tapeworms and gastric noises of one 
of their chief reasons for existence. 

He is brusque or rough when he speaks, not unkindly, 
of "one of those tow-head boys"; ® when he calls the 
Normans at Hastings "Twenty thousand thieves," 
improved, shortly after, into "filthy thieves"; when he 
talks of two Englishmen pounding "each other to a 
poultice"; ^ when he quotes his neighbor who puts his 
money "down his neck"; ^ when, having declared, "you 
are trying to make that man another 2/ow," he adds 
tartly, "One's enough." ^ 

He is contemptuous when he pictures men "writhing 
and roaring with rheumatism " ; ^^ when he talks of spoiled 
children who "squeal and screech";" when he reviles 

1 "Culture," VI, 134. » "Demonology," x, 26. 

8 "Works and Days," vii, 166. « Cabot, n, 578. 

5 C. E. C. II, 304. 6 "Civilization," vii, 21. 

' English Traits, v, 60-61; 78. ^ "Montaigne." iv, 153. 
8 "Education," x, 138. 

w "Sovereignty of Ethics," x, 195. " "West India." xi, 118. 



248 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

doctrines that would make the world "a greasy hotel" 
and men "a grimacing menagerie of monkeys and 
idiots"; ^ when he calls fine words "bilge- water" and 
describes the support granted to slavery as "snivel- 
ling"; 2 when he compares judges to idiots; ^ when he 
calls one type of old men "frowzy, timorous, peevish 
dotards"; * when he calls mesmerism "drivel" and 
"flatulency"; ^ when he speaks of certain doctrines as 
"the most swinish compost of mud and blood that was 
ever misnamed philosophy." ^ 

For examples of violence we depend largely on the 
"Journals," which we have hitherto forborne to quote 
in this section, and due allowance must be made in all 
such references for the intimate nature of the record. 
Emerson speaks of bad verses that will "go to the 
devil";' he admires, he even envies, the free use of 
imprecations; he quotes "damn" and its offspring with 
evident relish ("Damn George Washington," "Man- 
kind is a damned rascal"^); he invents a hypothetic 
dialogue between Dickens and his publisher in which 
the publisher says, "Damn truth"; ^ he writes of the 
"filthy enactment," in words profane only for the stu- 
pid, "I will not obey it, by God." ^o 

Emerson wanted words that reeked of things; he 
would not only have spoken daggers with Hamlet — 
he would have spoken chisels and harrows and bridges 

1 "Fugitive Slave Law," xi, 189. ^ "Kansas," xi, 259-60. 

3 "John Brown," xi, 272. * "Old Age," vii, 303. 

^ "Demonology," x, 26. ^ "Michael Angelo," xii, 222. 

' Jour. VIII, 176. 

8 "Uses of Great Men," iv, 27; "Montaigne," iv, 154. 

3 Jour. VI, 313. " Jour, viii, 236. 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 249 

and cars. The distance between thing and word is 
usually felt to be narrowest in the plainest and coars- 
est objects; hence his fondness for that type of vocab- 
ulary. 

VIII. Hyperbole 

Another trait, congenial to the above and demanding 
a moment's attention, is Emerson's propensity to strain 
language, to strain even truth itself in the pursuit of 
energy. 

The word "fury" is one of the powerful words in the 
language. To what does Emerson apply it? To the 
Dionysiac orgies and the Reign of Terror? Not at all. 
He applies it to the executive vigor of the English: 
**fury of life."^ He applies it to artistic enthusiasm: 
Angelo's "furious chisel." ^ He applies it to the youth's 
craving for knowledge: "fury of curiosity and acquisi- 
tion." ^ Even the wish to impart knowledge is a 
"fury."^ Everything is pushed to an extreme. "The 
Times" inspires not apprehension, not fear, as it in- 
telligibly might, but terror.^ The English do not dis- 
like or disapprove their neighbors; they hate them, 
French, Irish, Germans, with impartial vindictiveness.^ 
The rhythm of Spenser, Chapman, Marlowe is a "tor- 
nado." ^ The effect of color on the eye is a "sting." ^ 
If a man thinks about himself — not the rarest of 
offences surely — he is not to be corrected or disliked, 

1 English Traits, v, 103. 2 «oid Age," vii, 327. 

» "Clubs," VII, 229. * "Education," x, 149. 

6 English Traits, v, 267. « English Traits, v, 122. 

"" "Poetry and Imagination," viii, 50. 
8 E. in C. 98. 



250 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

he is to be hated "with a perfect hatred." ^ The "cries 
of prophets" would satisfy the normal demand for the 
picturesque; for Emerson they must " scream." ^ To 
attribute one devil to a conventionally prying woman 
might, it would seem, content a man who rebukes his 
fellows for the use of the superlative; Emerson furnishes 
her with a "platoon." ^ An enthusiast "drunk" with 
his belief is a pitiful anaemic creature; make him "des- 
perately drunk" if you want consequences.^ Will the 
reader find a word to stop the gap in the following sen- 
tence? "O Protean Nature, whose energy is change 

evermore, thou thyself into a berry or a drop." ^ 

In quiet moods, "distillest" or "infusest" or "convey- 
est" would probably suffice; if animation were wanted, 
he might say "flingest" or "castest." The word that 
actually fills this blank in Emerson is all but unbeliev- 
able; it is the word "hurlest." After this, when Emer- 
son tells us that certain trees are "full of brandy," ^ 
we incline to think that certain traits in his style may be 
explicable by his association with these topers. 

Meanwhile, he is pained if any one uses an excessive 
or violent expression. "Eichter," he sighs, "is a per- 
petual exaggeration and I get nervous." ' 

The thoughtful critic cannot praise this intemper- 
ance; whether the license lay in word or idea, whether 
his thought outran the fact or his speech outran his 
thought, the objection, in either case, seems clear and 

* Jour. VI, 337. ^ Jour, vii. 111. 

» Jour. VI, 390, 391. ^ Jour, vii, 105. 

6 Jour. V, 562-63. ^ Jour, vii, 298. 

7 Jour. VI, 283. 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 251 

decisive. Let censors remember, however, that the 
practice is far from miiversal and that it is an outcome 
of Emerson's express tactics and policy in things in- 
tellectual. He gave each idea its "head," in the par- 
lance of horsemanship, or its "fling," in the language of 
dissipation, relying on time and later experience to 
supply the needful corrective. The right and helpful 
word on this specialty of method is furnished us by 
the vigorous pen of Mr. J. J. Chapman: "Emerson's 
method is, not to give a generalization and trust to our 
making the allowance, but to give two conflicting state- 
ments and leave the balance of truth to be struck in 
our own minds on the facts. There is no inconsistency 
in this. It is a vivid and very legitimate mode of pro- 
cedure." ^ 

One point of discrimination must be added. Emerson's 
view is not that of the ordinary partialist or trafficker 
in superlatives. Three men may be discriminated: the 
man who makes reckless statements in good faith; the 
man who sees that reckless statements are partial, and, 
seeking universalism, becomes guarded; and the man 
who sees that guarded statements, likewise, are partial, 
and, seeking universalism in his turn, reverts to audac- 
ity. The third man was Emerson. His unqualified asser- 
tions were based on no conviction that the truth they 
proclaimed was absolute and final; but, seeing that all 
conceptions were provisional, he drew the curious but 
not indefensible inference that provisos were useless. 
Be generous to each thought in turn, and each thought 
in turn will be generous to you. Welcome the percep- 
* J. J. Chapman, Emerson and Other Essays, 36-37. 



252 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

tions as they come, and leave the audit and balance- 
sheet to time. 

IX. Word-Plat 

Emerson loved words, not merely as symbols, arbi- 
trary or natural, but as toys or castanets to jingle 
against each other. Sometimes the game takes the form 
of prose rhyme: "An orator is the thief of belief"; ^ 
thrifty trees "grow in spite of ice, lice, mice and borers." ^ 
Sometimes it is a linking of opposites: "this old Two- 
Face, creator-creature, mind-matter, right-wrong." ^ 
Again the same word is used in differing fashions or 
senses: "We owe to man man"; ^ "He carries ruins to 
ruins " ; ^ " By drainage we went down to a subsoil we did 
not know, and have found there is a Concord under old 
Concord, which we are now getting the best crops from; 
a Middlesex under Middlesex." ^ In "Swedenborg" he 
describes the pervading spirit impressively as "earth- 
beat, sea-beat, heart-beat." ^ He addresses the "Poet" 
as "true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! " ^ Still more com- 
mon and more subtly characteristic is his fashion of 
seeking form within form, nature within nature. The 
workers "have intercepted the sugar of the sugar, and 
the cotton of the cotton." ^ "Women carry sail, and men 
rudders. . . . The rudder of the rudder is not there" ^^ 
(with the women). Europeans emigrate, but "the Eu- 



* Jour. VII, 97. 


' "Power," VI, 62. 


' " Nominalist and Realist," 


Ill, 245. 


^ "Domestic Life," vii, 115. 


^ "Self-Reliance," ii, 81. 


6 "Farming," vii, 150. 


7 "Swedenborg," iv, 141. 


8 "The Poet." Ill, 42. 


» "Man the Reformer." i, 237. 


" Jour, viii, 175. 





EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 253 

rope of Europe" ^ is left behind. Man "is the flood of 
the flood and the fire of the fire." ^ The artist is to give 
"the gloom of gloom and the sunshine of sunshine." ^ 
This last group of cases denotes more than a whimsi- 
cality of language; they are linked to one of Emerson's 
profoundest feelings, the eternal sense, in Shakespearian 
phrase that "the greatest is behind," the reference of 
each object to a profounder and more inward object of 
which it is the shell and sign. He mentions this in "Rep- 
resentative Men" as a trait which Plato possessed and 
Shakespeare copied.^ 

X. Metaphor 

Metaphor is the stronghold of Emerson, and, one is 
half moved to add, Emerson is the stronghold of meta- 
phor. Minds as prolific and happy in the mere art or 
faculty have undoubtedly lived and written, but it is 
not clear that any other mind has united an equal skill 
in the practice of metaphor with so distinct a grasp of 
the depth of its insertion in the fabric of the universe. 
He had declared in the first of his published works ^ that 
the whole of nature is but a metaphor of the human 
mind, and the existence of things in many forms and on 
various planes, a fact of which metaphor is the expres- 
sion, may be placed among the cornerstones of his phi- 
losophy. Metaphor was to him what Hebrew and Greek 
had been to early theologians; it was the dialect of reve- 
lation. The power of Swedenborg lay mainly in the fact 

1 Jour. VIII, 226. 2 "Beauty," vi, 283. 

8 "Art," II, 351. 4 "Plato," iv. 88. 

6 "Nature," i, 32. 



254 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

that he had discerned its sacredness; the witchery of 
Shakespeare dwelt largely in his divination of its grace. 
It is only just to Emerson to add that he was equally 
sensitive to both appeals. 

When Emerson says that skates are wings on the ice 
but fetters on the ground/ "that the air is coined into 
song," 2 that " a man is the fagade of a temple wherein all 
wisdom and all good abide," ^ two things have plainly 
occurred in each example, — an escape and a reincarna- 
tion. The old literal form under which we viewed skates, 
air, or man has been summarily thrust aside, and yet 
this disenthralment has been accompanied by a reap- 
pearance in another form, equally clear-cut and agreeable 
to the imagination. This new concreteness is not a new 
enclosure, because it is obviously impossible for us to con- 
ceive skates as wings or air as coin or man as a church 
front for any length of time. Now it is the union in 
metaphor of the two things indispensable to a mind like 
Emerson's — liberation and embodiment — that make 
him throughout life its worshipper and servant. His 
thought demanded a habitation, yet rejected perma- 
nence in its habitation; the tent that met both needs was 
metaphor. 

The sureness, felicity, and vigor of this faculty in 
Emerson has made criticism unanimous in its praise. 
Its range may be readily conceived. We have seen how 
the diction — and the thought, of course, likewise — 
embraced a wide compass of plain, homely, and repul- 
sive facts and names. Conceive an imagination in which 

1 "Fate," VI, 15. » "Love," ii, 176. 

» "The Over-Soul," n, 270-71. 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER ^55 

kings and planets are as much at home as cobwebs and 
beggars, and the range of comparison will become obvi- 
ous. In his double and equal love of rude plainness and 
prodigal magnificence, and in his power to derive meta- 
phor from both, Emerson was a true scion or apt scholar 
of the Elizabethans. 

XI. Epigram 

The above exposition has shown that Emerson loved 
to shake off hampering qualifications and to carry his 
thought to pointed and pungent extremes, that he loved 
the play and click of words, that his gift in metaphor 
was transcendent. A little reflection will show that the 
traits so named are the equipment — the exact, and 
almost the entire, equipment — of the maker of epi- 
grams. 

An epigram resembles a dart in the force of its dis- 
charge, in the slenderness of its frame, and the sharp- 
ness of its point. The peculiarities in Emerson's epi- 
grams are that, though short, they are solid; that they 
are launched with vigor, but launched, as it were, in 
mid-air; that they pierce but rarely sting; that they are 
almost invariably imbedded in dense paragraphs; that 
they represent degrees of sincerity and seriousness to 
which this modish and mocking instrument is by no 
means thoroughly habituated. 

An epigram represents the intensification of the 
moment in literature ; it is fitting, therefore, that it 
should be the peculiar instrument of a man to whom 
the intensification of the moment was the import of 
Hfe. 



256 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

XII. Condensation 

Emerson is a condensed writer; that fact has pene= 
trated the grade schools, almost the hotel lobbies; and 
his condensation is rightly associated with his epigram. 
It would, nevertheless, be a grave error to conclude that 
the rate of condensation apparent in the epigrams is 
carried out in the essays. Emerson packs truth into a 
pregnant sentence; in the next sentence the packing is 
quite as expert, but the second truth is identical with 
the first. "Every great man is a unique. The Scipion- 
ism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow, 
Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shake- 
speare." 1 The first sentence is of rare compactness. 
The second and third sentences are highly condensed, 
but they condense the 'previous thought. At the end of 
the first sentence, the ratio of thoughts to words is one 
to six; at the end of the passage, it is one to twenty- 
eight. 

The truth is that by the test of diction Emerson is a 
chary writer; by the test of images he is prodigal; and 
both factors must be weighed in any just estimate of his 
effective condensation. The percentage of thought is 
highly variable. The long essay on "History" contains, 
in effect, but two thoughts, that innumerable forms 
repeat one message and that man is the doublet of the 
universe. The little essay on "Art " contains six or seven 
major propositions. The number of separable and con- 
siderable thoughts in an essay varies possibly from two 
to fifteen. The average of main thoughts to the cubic 
1 "Self-Reliance," n, 83. 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 257 

yard, so to speak, might be rudely conjectured to be 
twice as great as in Carlyle and Matthew Arnold — a 
very substantial and honorable superiority, it must be 
conceded, but far below what might be inferred from 
the comparison of Emerson with the two last named 
writers, sentence for sentence. The "Essays" do not 
even approach in compactness the "Maximes" of La 
Rochefoucauld or the "Pensees" of Joubert. 

XIII. Floridity 

Emerson's fondness for ornament was incontestable, 
and his schooling in this particular had been unlucky. 
Boston oratory was not always sparing or sober in dec- 
oration, and the virtues and even the asceticisms of 
Aunt Mary did not protect her from the composition 
of paragraphs in a taste that was Venetian, not to say 
barbaric. Emerson's early "Journals" betray this 
tutelage, and passages in his published works suggest 
that this was a matter in which he never quite outlived 
adolescence. "In youth," he says, "we clothe ourselves 
with rainbows and go as brave as the zodiac"; ^ a pas- 
sage which is meant to glorify youthful idealism, but 
which might aptly be regarded as a critique — and, in 
some sort, as an illustration — of the vices of youthful 
style. 

The quantity of this matter in Emerson is small — 
far less probably than one per cent of his entire output. 
It is not, however, wholly unimportant, for — if ap- 
pearances may be trusted — it has lost to Emerson's 
prose the approbation of an able and influential critic. 
» "Fate," VI, 41. 



258 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Matthew Arnold's inference, indeed, is strikingly unfair. 
^ He quotes two sentences which he thinks bad, quotes 
them as he admits, in their unrevised and more offen- 
sive form, and declares such writing to be "almost im- 
possible to a born man of letters." ^ Now, in the first 
place, the emphasis on the term "man of letters" is 
strategic, though the strategy may be undesigned. It 
suggests exclusions which the terms author and writer 
would not permit. It is redolent of the cabinet ; it ex- 
hales a sense of oflScial, clerkly, dexterous, disciplined, 
chastened, circimispect abilities. Arnold is right in 
withholding this praise from Emerson; but if a great 
writer be defined as one in whom expression cooperates 
powerfully with thought, Emerson's claims are mighty. 
The condemnation of Carlyle by Arnold on like grounds 
in the same passage amounts almost to an acquittal for 
Emerson. 

The offending passage should be quoted: "Every soul 
is a celestial being to every other soul. The heart has its 
sabbaths and jubUees, in which the world appears as a 
hymeneal feast, and all natural sounds and the circle 
of the seasons are erotic odes and dances." ^ This pas- 
sage is gelatinous : that word sums up its modest guilt. 
Does it really cut off its perpetrator from all hope of 
eminence in style .^ Has any one drawn up a schedule of 
the things of which great men of letters are incapable? 
Would great men of letters, would Shakespeare, would 
Milton, would Matthew Arnold, be thankful for the 
promulgation of such a schedule? Does the thing exist 

* Arnold, Discourses in America, 159-68. 

2 Quoted in Arnold, Discourses in America, 160. 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 259 

of which great men of letters are incapable? The worst 
of almost any great man in almost any field might seem 
to make his best impossible. 

The friend of Emerson might be tolerant of certain 
retrenchments. He may feel that he should be content 
if Emerson would say "thou" rather less and "'tis" 
not at all; if he forbore to write "thanks evermore" to 
Carlyle, and "all your loveliness," meaning all your 
lovely conduct, to Dr. Furness; ^ if he discountenanced 
the word "blushing" ("blushing emotion," "blushing 
boys ") ; 2 if he stood out against saying that a wise man 
is "frankincense and flowers" and that action is "pearls 
and rubies to his discourse";^ if he would picture a 
benefactor under a form less resplendent than "a shower 
of falling stars"; ^ if he would be a trifle less free with 
"kings" who make his essays like the antechamber of 
Napoleon; if he were less anxious to have people "per- 
fumed . . . with hope and power." ^ But these cavils are 
a little captious where the faults are sporadic only; and 
where generous amends are made from time to time by 
the proffer of passages in the ornate style where loftiness 
and beauty rule unchallenged. We have only to cite the 
conclusion of "Spiritual Laws," the opening of the sec- 
ond "Nature," and the splendid initial passage of the 
famous "Address." 

* Furness, Letters, 48. 

« "Character," m, 105; "Domestic Life," vn, 119. 
» " Politics," m, 216; "The American Scholar," i, 95. 

* "Domestic Life," vn, 129. 
" "Circles," ii, 319. 



260 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

XIV. Rhythm 

The merit of prose rhythm is rarely ascribed to Emer- 
son, yet it seems to us that his faculty of rhythm within 
the sentence was notable and that even in files of sen- 
tences progression and perspective are distinctly to be 
seen. What passage ever orbed itself into grander cir- 
cuits than the passage beginning "There are days which 
occur in this climate " in the induction of the second 
"Nature"?! 

To appreciate the prose rhythm of Emerson, two 
facts must be diligently remembered: that the arc of 
vibration is often narrow, and that the rate of vibration 
is often slow. Take the following sentence from "Fate " ; 
"Things ripen, new men come." ^ The effect, in rapid 
and continuous reading, is brusque and angular. But 
make the pauses needful for balance, read "Things || 
ripen: || new men || come"; and the ear is gratified by 
the compact but stately undulations. Perhaps the most 
remarkable instance of the kind is found in "Clubs": 
"We know beforehand that yonder man must think as 
we do. Has he not hands, — two feet, — hair and nails? 
Does he not eat, — bleed, — laugh, — cry? " ^ Read 
swiftly, the passage is a series of jolts; read gravely, 
slowly, with due recognition of commas and dashes, 
its rhythm is unmistakable. The minuet must not be 
danced to the tune of the jig. 

In the fitting of sentence to sentence in the texture 
of paragraphs, the range of merit is considerable. Re- 
search or good fortune will light upon passages the 

1 "Nature," in, 169. « "Fate." vi, 39. » "Clubs." vn. 234. 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 261 

beauty of which, in this particular, is ideal. Take the 
following from "English Traits": ^ — 

"The hopes of the commoners take the same direction 
with the interest of the patricians. Every man who be- 
comes rich buys land and does what he can to fortify 
the nobility, into which he hopes to rise. The Anglican 
clergy are identified with the aristocracy. Time and law 
have made the joining and moulding perfect in every 
part. The cathedrals, the Universities, the national 
music, the popular romances, conspire to uphold the 
heraldry which the current politics of the day are sap- 
ping. The taste of the people is conservative. They are 
proud of the castles, and of the language and symbol of 
chivalry. Even the word lord is the luckiest style that 
is used in any language to designate a patrician. The 
superior education and manners of the nobles recom- 
mend them to the country." 

Let us now listen to Emerson at his worst (the pas- 
sage is taken from the second essay on " Art"): ^ — 

"The first and last lesson of the useful arts is that 
Nature tyrannizes over our works. They must be con- 
formed to her law, or they will be ground to powder by 
her omnipresent activity. Nothing droll, nothing whim- 
sical will endure. Nature is ever interfering with Art. 
You cannot build your house or pagoda as you will, 
but as you must. There is a quick bound set to your 
caprice. The leaning tower can only lean so far. The 
veranda or pagoda can curve upward only to a certain 
point. The slope of your roof is determined by the 
weight of snow." 

1 English Traits, v, 173, 174. « "Art," vii, 41. 



262 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

For a passage classified as "worst," the above cita- 
tion must be acknowledged to be surprisingly respect- 
able. It may be said to exhibit an indecisive struggle 
between a true feeling for rhythm and a strong propen- 
sity toward curtness. The centre of interest is the fact 
that just as there is a paragraph-logic in Emerson which 
the mob — even the "mob of gentlemen who write with 
ease" — are dilatory in acknowledging, so likewise is 
there a paragraph-rhythm, perceptible even in the most 
luckless moments, and capable, in favored hours, of 
mounting to perfection. The theory that Emerson, to 
mind and ear, is a bare handful of particles has proved 
its right to an honorable interment: "dust to dust." 

In conclusion, a detail, interesting but hardly impor- 
tant, may be adverted to. Emerson's ear seems not to 
have partaken of the repulsion commonly felt by sensi- 
tive ears for the close proximity of similar sounds. Some 
odd cacophonies result. "We left the train at Salis- 
bury and took a carriage to Amesbury." ^ "This van- 
guard of civility and power they coldly hold." ^ "If the 
race is good, so is the place." ^ "In the silence of tradi- 
tion this one relation to science," ^ etc. "The planet 
itself splits his stick." ^ "And to these, their ends, all 
things continually ascend." ^ "Can you bottle the ef- 
flux of a June noon?" ^ "The sphinxes scorn dunces." ^ 
" We will give up our coaches, and wine, and watches." ^ 
The trait is too scattered to be influential in his prose; 
but its extension to his verse was unlucky, 

1 English Traits, v, 276. 2 English Traits, v, 101. 

3 English Traits, v, 77. ^ English Traits, v, 281. 

^ "Civilization," vii, 27. ^ "Uses of Great Men," iv, 11. 

^ "Country Life," xii, 157. ^ Jour, x, 408. 

8 "Fugitive Slave Law," xi, 209. 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 263 

XV. Polarity 

All careful and able writing tends in two directions, 
inclines to one or other of two opposite poles. On the 
one hand, literature and extended and meditated 
speech are social functions; as such, they are subject to 
the social regulations which enjoin decency, politeness, 
order, consistency, moderation. On the other hand, 
they reflect the universe, and, as reflectors, they tend 
to reproduce the variety, the intensity, the barbarity, 
and the extravagance which the universe not seldom 
discloses. On one side, the occasion, the setting, re- 
fines and assimilates the crude facts, imparting to all 
the good-breeding, the suavity, and the uniformity of 
the parlance of the drawing-room. On the other, the 
strong fact, with its two servitors, passion and imagi- 
nation, tends always to the narrowing of the interval 
between word and thing, to the identification of litera- 
ture with the life it copies, and the consequent develop- 
ment of vividness and diversity. Let us call the first of 
these tendencies, style (not forgetting that the word has 
other values), and the second, expression or expressive- 
ness. They oppose each other, or, rather, each opposes 
the other's extreme; style tends to dyke in or embank 
expression: expression tends to overflow and submerge 
style. The victory of style gives us authors like Mon- 
taigne, La Bruyere, Goethe (in his prose), Addison, 
Swift, Gibbon, Scott, Jane Austen, Macaulay, and Haw- 
thorne: the victory of expression produces writers like 
Milton (in his prose), Sterne, Hugo, De Quincey, Lamb, 
Dickens, Thackeray, and Carlyle. 



264 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



^ 



The situation of Emerson between these antagonisms 
is a little odd, but is capable of clear-cut definition. He 
represents expression on an academic basis; or, to be 
more explicit, a style based on the norm trying to con- 
vert itself into a style based on the variation, and only 
half carrying out the wheel or swinging movement by 
which this change in basis was to be effected. 

XVI. Style 

The grave, sedate lad, whom the elders in sober and 
devout Boston approved, reproduced in his earlier com- 
positions the academic ideals which consorted with his 
habitat, his ancestry, his destined calling, and with one 
phase at least of his diverse and as yet uncharted tem- 
perament. The tone is restrained, deliberate, clerical. 
The following passage, written at twenty-nine, at the 
close of his brief pastorate, may be cited as an example : 
"What I revere and obey in it is its reality, its boundless 
charity, its deep interior life, the rest it gives to mind, 
the echo it returns to my thoughts, the perfect accord 
it makes with my reason through all its representation 
of God and His Providence; and the persuasion and 
courage that come out thence to lead me upward and 
onward. Freedom is the essence of this faith. It has for 
its object simply to make men good and wise. Its in- 
stitutions then should be as flexible as the wants of men. 
That form out of which the life and suitableness have 
departed should be as worthless in its eyes as the dead 
leaves that are falling around us." * 

Nobody could launch a bomb-shell more sedately. 
* "The Lord's Supper," xi, 21 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 265 

This demure voice was, moreover, the voice of the real 
Emerson, or, rather, of one real Emerson; for there 
sprang from these chastened loins another Emerson, a 
lusty and sinewy manchild, of imperious and various 
exigency, who never quite matured and who rather per- 
plexed and troubled than dej&nitely shook off the mild 
paternal discipline. The style became checkered with 
moods and phases in ample variety, which seem often to 
prophesy its evolution into a form in which expressive- 
ness is dominant: but the evolution is arrested, the pre- 
diction is but half fulfilled. Some illustrations of these 
moods will show the degree to which a style may be- 
come versatile without gaining — in the strict sense — 
fluidity or suppleness. (The list of moods or phrases is 
not exhaustive.) 

a. Plainness and pith. "Beasts, fire, water, stones, 
and corn serve him. The field is at once his floor, his 
work-yard, his garden, and his bed. . . . The private 
poor man hath cities, ships, canals, bridges, built for 
him. ... He sets his house upon the road, and the human 
race go forth every morning, and shovel out the snow, 
and cut a path for him." ^ 

b. Powerful assertiveness. "They believe that mus- 
tard bites the tongue, that pepper is hot, friction- 
matches incendiary, revolvers are to be avoided, and 
suspenders hold up pantaloons." ^ "Let him not quit 
his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient 
and honorable of the earth aflSrm it to be the crack of 
doom." ^ 

1 "Nature," i, 13-14. « "Montaigne," iv, 153.' 

» "The American Scholar," i, 102. 



266 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

c. Tingling, elastic buoyancy. "I seem to partake its 
rapid transformations; the active enchantment reaches 
my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning 
wind." 1 

d. Exhilaration in rough strength or ferocity. "These 
Norsemen are excellent persons in the main, with good 
sense, steadiness, wise speech and prompt action. But 
they have a singular turn for homicide; their chief end 
of man is to murder or be murdered. The sight of a tent- 
cord or a cloak-string puts them on hanging somebody, 
a wife, or a husband, or, best of all, a king. If a farmer 
has so much as a hay-fork, he sticks it into a King 
Dag." 2 

e. High and frosty aloofness. "Say to them, f O father, 
O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with 
you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the 
truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I 
obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no 
covenants but proximities.' " ^ 

/- Truculence. "Then again, do not tell me, as a good 
man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in 
good situations. Are they my poor.? I tell thee, thou 
foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the 
dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong 
to me and to whom I do not belong.' " ^ 

g. Apocalyptic wrath. "Nobody doubts that Daniel 
Webster could make a good speech. Nobody doubts 
that there were good and plausible things to be said on 
the part of the South. But this is not a question of 

1 "Nature," i, 17. 2 English Traits, v, 58-59. 

3 "Self-Reliance," 11, 72-73. * "Self-Reliance," 11. 52. 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 267 

ingenuity, not a question of syllogisms, but of sides. 
How came he there? ^^ ^ 

h. Youthful passion. See familiar passages in "Love," 
Works, n, 173-78. 

L Love. "He is mine. I am my brother and my brother 
is me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone by great 
neighbors, I can yet love." ^ 

j. Benignant irony — gentle satire of the humanita-* 
rians. "The ox must be taken from the plough and 
the horse from the cart, the hundred acres of the farm 
must be spaded, and the man must walk wherever boats 
and locomotives will not carry him. Even the insect 
world was to be defended, — that had been too long 
neglected, and a society for the protection of ground- 
worms, slugs, and mosquitos was to be incorporated 
without delay." ^ 

k. Benignant irony plus intimate tenderness. "All day, 
between his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon- 
house, sputters and spurs and puts on his faces of im- 
portance: and when he fasts, the little Pharisee fails not 
to sound his trumpet before him." ^ 

/. Romanticized courtliness. Read the entire "wood- 
god" passage in "Character," Works, iii, 105-07. 

m. Heroic exaltation. "And yet the love that will be 
annihilated sooner than treacherous has already made 
death impossible, and affirms itself no mortal but a 
native of the deeps of absolute and inextinguishable 
being." ^ 

» "Fugitive Slave Law," (n) xi, 225. 2 «' Compensation," n, 124. 

» "New England Reformers," m, 252, 253. 

* "Domestic Life," vii, 104. ^ "Heroism," ii, 264. 



268 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

n. Beatitude. "Ineffable is the union'of man and God 
in every act of the soul. The simplest person who in his 
integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and 
ever the influx of this better and universal self is new 
and unsearchable." ^ 

The expense of space which the above citations have 
imposed has not been profitless. They bring out, as 
general phrases or insulated examples could not do, the 
extent to which Emerson's mature style became parti- 
colored, sensitive, and variable; and they edge the sur- 
prise with which one finally discovers that, after all this 
eclecticism and abandonment, it remains, in virtue and 
effect, an academic style. The sallies of temperament 
are many and diverse, impetuous sometimes, and ener- 
getic; the style seems ready to take on the mobile ex- 
pressiveness of Carlyle's or Thackeray's : yet, at the end 
of the essay, one feels that a grave person has uttered a 
sedate discourse. The ice cracks and loosens, but hardly 
thaws; or, to vary the figure, the waves dance and ripple 
certainly, but they dance and ripple, not in the open 
sea, but in the clefts of the hillside. The poiut of dra- 
matic and psychological signiQcance in Emerson's style 
is the effort of temperament — never wholly successful 
but never quite unsuccessful — to throw off the shackles 
of discipline. 

XVII. Inhibitions 

Emerson aspired toward two traits or qualities of 
style, the intense and the organic. To multiply signifi- 
cance, to charge words with the quality of things, to 
1 "The Over-Soul." ii, 292. 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 269 

reach ultimata, finalities, in expression — this was the 
aim. Out of this ambition rise his leading traits, merits 
and defects, the intrepid metaphor, the flashing epigram, 
the unchained hyperbole, the approach, both in homely 
and in florid language, to the outmost confines of good 
taste, the annulment of verbiage, the pursuit of con- 
densation. But beyond this power to coruscate and 
crepitate with meaning, he saw another primal virtue in 
language, the virtue that made it organic or constitu- 
tional, the free and native outflow of the personality. 
Emerson's search for the first of these virtues made him 
only half successful in the attainment of the second. 

The writings of Emerson show an unlimited and un- 
interrupted vivacity. In that respect they do not fully 
represent his temper: more precisely, they represent one 
half of his temper to the exclusion of the other half. 
While the intellectual energy of the man Emerson was 
remarkable, it was mixed with a great deal that was 
placid, seK-tolerant, and easy-going. He could spare 
himself; he could loiter and stroll; in his Cambridge 
invalid days, he could shut up his books in a cloudy 
July noon, put on his old clothes and old hat, and slink 
away to the whortleberry bushes.^ One sometimes 
wonders if it would not have been wholesome for his 
literary style to put on its old clothes, occasionally, and 
pick whortleberries. It never dreamed of such descents. 

Part of Emerson's alertness, therefore, represents 
spontaneity, and part, the man's pressure on himself. 
The crack of the self -applied whip is audible in the 
sentences. 

1 Cabot, 1, 137. 



270 RALPH WALDO EMERSON « 

The attractiveness of the style, when pressure is 
momentarily relieved by a lapse into narrative or even 
a resort to business, suggests that a charming writer 
was spoiled when nature decided to make Emerson a 
great one. The "Journals" aid us materially at this 
point by supplying examples of relaxation of a less pro- 
nounced but more extensive kind. They contain vast 
amounts of bright and terse writing; but the mere in- 
terposition of long breaths, authorized by the spaces 
between topics, if by nothing else, makes them more 
tractable, more readahhy than the essays. 

An essay is a structure, a contrivance, not an eflflux; 
but, in its highest evolution, it mimics the efflux, it 
repeats, in a condensed and sublimated form, the spon- 
taneous movements of its fabricator's mind. It labors 
and rests, pursues and attains, rises and falls. The 
unaccented syllables in this rhythm are not reproduced 
in Emerson; his feet are all spondees. 

Had Emerson a native impulse to write? The mere 
"Journals" answer this question. The daily record of 
daily thoughts, for their own sake, in finished and sculp- 
tured language is rare enough even among great writers 
to make the general incentive to write, the abstract need 
of expression^ on Emerson's part incontestable. But it 
seems probable that often, perhaps usually, between the 
single thought and its expression, there intervened a 
reluctance, diffidence, or hesitation. Of this unwilling- 
ness the style gives no hint, or hints at it only in the 
heightened energy which the conquest of that reluc- 
tance involved. 

The fault of the style, in relation both to reader and 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 271 

author, is want of relation to the processes of conscious- 
ness: it does not recognize the reader's processes; it does 
not reproduce the author's. Commodious, from the 
reader's normal point of view, the style is not; it is 
niggardly of reliefs and facilities; the quality and con- 
tinuity of its demand precludes that systole and diastole 
which is essential to the healthy and cheerful operation 
of the human mind. One the author's side, the fabric 
tells little of the factory; the result is estranged from the 
process. It is true that Emerson's work aims to give a 
surcharge, a distilment, of his thought: but to distil 
ideas is not to distil personality: in fact, personality 
consists, or at least subsists, so much in minutiae and 
inessentials that the reduction of a life to its quintes- 
sence really prevents that unconscious autobiography 
in which the personality as an artistic efflux so largely 
resides. 

Hence Emerson, although he loved processes and 
scorned results, although he wished to embody and 
convey himself, rarely succeeded in this purpose, and 
succeeded least in the works which are the basis of his 
fame. We speak now of the man of letters who en- 
grosses posterity, not the lecturer with his subtler ema- 
nations for receptive contemporaries. Even the moods 
which dapple his work suggest a premeditated abandon- 
ment. His compositions, therefore, have the virtue of 
sincerity in the full ethical sense of the term "virtue," 
but hardly in the fulness of its magical or aesthetic sense. 
They have everything of sincerity except the bloom, 
and of sincerity the very bloom is precious. It is true 
that the worth of Emerson lies not in the philosophy 



272 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

but in the life, but of that life the prose works must be 
viewed as the attestations rather than the specimens. 
Destiny refuses the intimate craving even of her best 
beloved. Emerson's longing was to be swept away by 
a mastering inspiration, a Pentecostal wind: instead he 
composes literature even in his "Journals,** and makes 
two drafts of letters to his private friends. 

XVIII. Conclusion 

The desire of explicitness and precision has resulted 
probably in an over-emphasis on the restrictions handled 
in the foregoing section. At most and at worst, they 
merely limit, in a noticeable degree, the adaptation of 
Emerson's prose to continuous perusal. A certain ten- 
sion and constraint, a sense that things are rather con- 
veyed than imparted, rather brought to us than given, 
mixes an element of discomfort with the enjoyment and 
stimulus which are vested in perpetuity, so to speak, in 
the inestimable prose of Emerson. The Alpine traveller 
is subject to inconveniences which do not trouble the 
wayfarer in the quiet plains: he has also his marvellous 
compensations. 

Emerson fails to achieve perspective in his essays, to 
give to three or four main ideas the distinction which is 
secured by the use of many secondary thoughts in the 
form of pedestals or substructures. But no man is more 
likely to flash out in the process of a discourse three or 
four phrases which would stamp both idea and phrase 
in lasting solidarity on the reader's mind, and it is 
doubtful if anything more than this is effected by the 
most masterly exhibitions of perspective. 



EMERSON AS PROSE-WRITER 273 

But continuous reading represents only one section — 
perhaps a small section — of the influence of a thought- 
ful, and, more especially, of a sententious, writer. It may 
be a question if the wedge by which Emerson pierces 
and shall pierce the indifference of mankind is not found 
in the sentence rather than the essay. It is the sentence 
that embodies the point, and it is the point that pene- 
trates. It is the vital phrase in its isolated reappear- 
ance in the reader's brooding memory, in its quotation 
on the alien page — in neither of which contexts is it 
likely to suffer the drawback of a too resplendent set- 
ting — that may be most effective in prolonging and 
diffusing the influence of Emerson. Nor can one readily 
name the man better fitted to beget sentences which 
shall have careers in their own right, more expert in 
lending to the great and memorable in thought the sup- 
port of the unforgettable in phrase. It is curious to note, 
in conclusion, that while the larger units of his work 
must be criticised, as, up to a certain point, unhandy or 
unbusinesslike, the individual phrases are as adroit and 
tactical as they are lofty and felicitous; they are made 
to be grasped, to be repeated, to be remembered; the 
fame of their producer as a master of language could be 
safely trusted to their influence alone. 



CHAPTER VI 

EMERSON AS POET 
I. CONTEOVERSY 

The history of critical opinion, in the fields of Emer- 
son's prose and verse, has been singularly different. The 
world made up its mind, hastily and all but unani- 
mously, on the subject of the prose. Various half-true 
or untrue assumptions, including the assumption that 
knowledge on the subject was complete, passed con- 
tentedly from mind to mind, and enough of error is cur- 
rent even to-day to afford scope for alteration and read- 
justment. The verse, on the other hand, has provoked 
a fairly keen and brisk controversy, and, as debate 
sharpens perception, the main qualities of the poems 
have been definitely ascertained, without any abate- 
ment in the warmth of the contention. On the nature 
of his poetic traits, on the classification of those traits 
as bad or good, men are pretty well agreed. The pas- 
sages which transport the believers are enjoyed by 
the sceptics; the faults which the assailants detest are 
painful to the defenders. The difference is resolvable 
into a shift of stress, and rests at last on those organic 
peculiarities in critics which argument is slow to discern 
and powerless to reconcile. 

That minds keenly sensitive to logic and coherence 
and less vividly responsive to outleaps of inspiration, 
minds like Mr. (since Lord) John Morley and Mr. W. C. 



EMERSON AS POET 275 

Brownell, should be unfavorable to Emerson's verse is 
an outgrowth of the nature of things for which neither 
Mr. Morley nor Mr. Brownell — nor even Emerson — 
should be hastily or harshly blamed. The nature of 
things seems equally and more genially manifest in the 
value set upon these poems by men like E. C. Stedman 
and Professor Woodberry in whom the instinct for pure 
poetry is conspicuous. But the negative of the first two 
critics hardly possesses the same weight as the aflSrma- 
tions of the last-named judges. It is easier to conceive 
that two accomplished prospectors like Mr. Morley and 
Mr. Brownell should have missed the discovery of "pay- 
ing ore" in the deep-laid strata of a rugged coimtry than 
that two expert mineralogists like E. C. Stedman and 
Professor Woodberry should have been hoodwinked 
into the taking of iron pyrites for gold. Even the scep- 
tics do not deny the existence of "traces" of the authen- 
tic metal: they protest merely that the percentage is 
unremunerative. 

The truth seems to be that there is at one extreme of 
Emerson's work a small area about whose incorrigible 
badness all men are pretty well agreed; that at the other 
extreme is another small area which unifies all suffrages 
in coromendation of its excellence; that between these 
extremes lies a much larger area of less decided quality 
which the hostile critics affliate with the fiirst of these 
extremes, the admirers, contrariwise, with the second. 
This semi-neutral mass — this middle-class element 
which, among gentlefolk, passes for gentle, but which, 
in the company of the mob, might be reckoned as 
canaille — exists perhaps to a greater extent than we 



276 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

imagine even in poets of incontestable eminence, like 
Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson. In Emerson the bulk of 
the indecisive material is comparatively large, and the 
attitude of the critic toward it will determine whether 
Emerson as poet is counted by that critic among the 
prophets shot with ineptitudes or the bunglers visited 
with inspirations. 

II. Technique 

There can be no question as to the frequent and fla- 
grant badness of Emerson's versification. If it were less 
questionable — if, for instance, it could be discovered 
with a qualm of horror or a thrill of triumph — its ef- 
fect on the reader might be more injurious. When David 
Copperfield, at Salem House, was obliged to wear the 
contumelious placard "Take care of him. He bites," he 
was saved from all embarrassment in meeting his school- 
fellows by Tommy Traddles who presented him punctu- 
ally to each comer with the inspiriting formula, "Look 
here! Here's a game." The very obviousness and hope- 
lessness of Emerson's versification in certain places 
renders him the same service which the friendly adver- 
tisement of Traddles performed for the unlucky David. 
A substantial amelioration ensues, when a fault bad 
enough to be really serious is aggravated to the point of 
becoming really comic. We say, in amused leniency, 
"Look here! Here 's a game." 

Moreover, a fault in prosody, however serious, is 
after all a finite, a tangible, to some extent a separable 
and manageable thing. It deducts^ but it need not per- 
manently derange or distress; its effect is like that of a 



EMERSON AS POET 277 

number of jolts, occurring, we will say, at intervals of 
ten minutes, in the course of a drive through a romantic 
country in a dreamy afternoon. The discomfort is real 
enough, but it rather interrupts than disenchants;^ 
Emerson's rhymes are often pitiable: one begins by 
indignation at such couplings as nature, feature ; JormSy 
worms; hurry, busy; swamp, lamp; realm, film; grace, 
praise; own, down; coats, spots; alive, give. But, before 
he has done with us, he contrives to extenuate or efface 
all these transgressions by such further iniquities as: 
thoughts, doubts; god, cloud; hour, slower; power, restore; 
arms, psalms; likeness, sickness; science, clairvoyance; 
doeth, knoweth; pronounce, persuasions; Italian, Cas- 
tilian; generous, rose; draw, proprietor. 

All this looks very serious, but the amount of bad 
rhyme that verse, otherwise strong, will float is some- 
thing that it has not entered into the heart of uncritical 
or unobservant readers to conceive. It may be doubted 
whether the best singers are the most precise rhyme- 
sters, the perfection of music commonly implying a 
speed and impulsiveness in the movement which re- 
fuses to stop its course or cool its fervor in any higgling 
concern for the niceties of consonance. The question of 
rhythm is grave, and Emerson's faults in this regard, 
though less frequent, are more troublesome. He can 
write lines that pierce the ear like gimlets: — 

" To a beauty that not fades." * 

"And the friend not hesitates." 2 

To find a parallel to these acuminate "t's," we should 
* Poems, IX, 174. ^ Poems, ix, 80. 



^1 



278 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

have to recur to the author of "Tiie Scholar-Gipsy" 
(a disparager of Emerson's poetic claims) in lines like 

"Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?" ^ 

or like the third line with its italicized pronoun in the 
following quatrain: — 

"What poets feel not, when they make, 
A pleasure in creating. 
The world, in its turn, will not take 
Pleasure in contemplating." * 

One turns from this to Emerson, as Lear turned back 
to Goneril from Regan. 

The American poet, again, will omit a syllable in a 
place where its absence deranges an entire line in a 
critical passage : — 

"Built in an age, the mad wind's night work." ' 

To equal this, recourse must be had to a mulcted pen- 
tameter in one of the most impressive lyrics of the 
author of "Prometheus Unbound": — 

"Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar." 

Again, to find an appropriate dust-heap on which to cast 
so dissonant a combination of vowels as 

"Of thine eye I am eyebeam," * 

one would have to revert to the love-sonnets of a cer- 
tain subject of Queen Elizabeth who added the follow- 
ing line to the museum of literary curiosities: — 
"For as you were when first your eye I eyed." ^ 

1 Arnold, Poetical WorJcs, "The Scholar-Gipsy," 279. 

2 Arnold, Poetical Works ^ "A Caution to Poets," 243. 

3 Poems, IX, 42. ^ Poems, ix, 24. 
^ Shakespeare, Sonnet civ. 



EMERSON AS POET 279 

It is with the prosody of the great poets as with the 
English of the great writers as a class; they do not so 
much avoid blunders as the appearance, the manner, of 
blundering. They have the license and the aplomb of 
aristocrats: in the commission of offences which would 
disgrace a bourgeois, their bearing is irreproachable. 
This coolness and balance was not shared by Emerson. 
His poetry is unassured, and when he blunders, his 
verses have a telltale air of being caught in the act. We 
do not mean that he was necessarily ashamed of these 
transgressions: on the contrary, he often gives the im- 
pression of imposing these errors on himself as a high 
sesthetic penance, or recondite thank-offering to some 
divine protector of plainness and sincerity in speech. 
The point is that Emerson, unlike most of his fellow- 
culprits, not only sins but confesses; and the confession 
has a double effect in disarming censure at the same 
time that it emphasizes the fault. 

III. Coherence 

More serious than these deficiencies in technique is 
the structural laxity of a great number of the poems. 
What Lowell said of Emerson's criticism of verse, that 
"while no man is so sensitive to what is poetical, few 
men are less sensible than he of what makes a poem," * 
applies with equal force to his constructive work in 
poetry. Emerson did not habitually conceive life in 
those blocks or units to which poems are complemental. 
His typical — not his universal — principle of cement 
was a law or abstraction supported by concrete ex- 
* Lowell, Prose Works, i, 354. 



280 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

amples, normally brief and often fairly numerous. Now 
it is clear that if you have this kind of matter to submit, 
you may do various things: you may present the law by 
itseK, or in the company of one or two or ten or fifty 
illustrations, the only limits to the number of illustra- 
tions being fixed by the fertility of your own imagina- 
tion and the opulence of nature. It is obvious that there 
is nothing self -limiting, and, therefore, nothing organic, 
in such a method. 

So strong is Emerson's propensity in this direction 
that even in a poem of ten lines one is conscious of that 
peculiar combination of incompleteness and redundance 
which is characteristic of the method. The following is 
called "Heroism ":i— 

"Ruby wine is drunk by knaves. 
Sugar spends to fatten slaves. 
Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons; 
Thunder-clouds are Jove's festoons. 
Drooping oft in wreaths of dread. 
Lightning-knotted roimd his head; 
The hero is not fed on sweets. 
Daily his own heart he eats; 
Chambers of the great are jails. 
And head-winds right for royal sails." 

On this poem two questions might be put to the au- 
thor with equal propriety: Why not half as many speci- 
fications? and Why not twice as many? and both ques- 
tions are unanswerable. One says with Touchstone: 
"I'll rhyme you so eight years together." The single 
poem becomes a kind of anthology and shares with the 
anthology an indefinite latitude both of excision and of 
augmentation. 

1 Poems, IX, 272. 



EMERSON AS POET 281 

Poetry of this kind may evince an authentic inspira- 
tion, as the verses on "Heroism" unquestionably do, 
but inspiration is no more organic completeness than 
breath — a Saxon synonym for the idea — is body. 
Even "May-Day," where the "trembling ecstasy" is 
surely at its acme, is defenceless against Arnold's pointed 
remark that it consists of a series of observations.^ So 
inveterate is the bent toward discursiveness that even 
when Emerson has, in a fashion, written a poem, as in 
the "Threnody," he will half unwrite it by adding, 
without break, under the same title, the outcome of a 
later period and altered mood. 

Some points in Emerson's versification are the normal 
expression of these tendencies. It is natural that a 
thought of indeterminate extension should express itseK 
in spreading, imgirt stanzas like those of "May-Day," 
"To Rhea," "Wood-Notes," and "Monadnoc." It is 
natural, again, that an order whose basis is parallelism 
should find embodiment in uniform metres like blank 
verse or the octosyllabic couplet in which groups of like 
thoughts can be readily sheaved or fagoted. 

The lack of organic unity is no surprise to those who 
have penetrated the nature of Emerson. His method 
is not the usual artistic method of conquest by instal- 
ments; it consists in the immediate capture, and the 
continuous recapture, of the whole. His poetry, like 
his life, was, in theory at least, a succession — not 
properly a series — of glorified, self-inwrapt, and self- 
sufficing moments. 

* Arnold, Discourses in Americay 157. 



282 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

IV. Parable 

The form which thought assumes in Emerson's prose 
— that of law or abstraction plus an unfixed number of 
concrete embodiments — has clearly some hardships or 
exigencies for the imagination. The law as such is im- 
ponderable; the concrete images are rapid and fragmen- 
tary: the alternative is want of substance or want of 
anchorage. It resembles a whirlpool or vortex in which a 
centre that is hollow is the attracting and controlling 
point of a whirl of objects which become half illusory 
through their lustre, their variety, and the swiftness 
of their rotation. Does not a prose with this basis call 
imperatively for a certain kind of poetry as its nat- 
ural correlate and corrective? Beside this hurried flut- 
ter of many fugitive, diminished, and in some degree 
obscured appearances, was there not a place for a 
single, enlarged, abiding, and clarified image.? If his 
prose gave us his "Sermon on the Mount," would not 
his poetry serve a useful end as the receptacle and organ 
of his parables? 

Emerson had an aim of this sort in view in a large 
section of his verse and, on one occasion, he proved be- 
yond question that he was capable of succeeding in this 
endeavor. That success was the poem "Days." ^ Here 
all conditions meet, apt parable, interesting story, pic- 
ture, drama, vivid culmination, compression into eleven 
beautiful lines. 

Very different from this is the usual outcome. The 
following may serve as an illustration: ^ — 

1 Poems, IX, 228. ^ Poems, ix, 170. 



EMERSON AS POET 283 

"Heat with viewless fingers moulds. 
Swells, and mellows, and matures. 
Paints, and flavors, and allures. 
Bird and brier inly warms. 
Still enriches and transforms. 
Gives the reed and lily length. 
Adds to oak and oxen strength, . . . 
What god is this imperial Heat, 
Earth's prime secret, sculpture's seat? 
Doth it bear hidden in its heart 
Water-line patterns of all art? 
Is it Daedalus? is it Love? 
Or walks in mask almighty Jove, 
And drops from Power's redundant horn 
All seeds of beauty to be born? " 

Thfee comments may be made on this passage. 
First, there is no story or anecdote. Second, the be- 
wildering multiplicity and f ugaciousness from which we 
sought escape in the simplicity of parable has followed 
us into our city of refuge. Third, for the abstraction, 
heat, to which daily and scientific usage had habitu- 
ated us and which had become intelligible even if it 
remained unimaginable, a personification of an evasive 
and perfunctory kind has been substituted. The lifeless 
impersonation appears frequently under many names. 
Sometimes it is Rhea, sometimes the World-Soul, some- 
times (with slightly quickened animation) the Sphinx 
or the pine-tree, sometimes Saadi and again Merlin; and 
once it is Guy. 

Mr. John Morley (in the days when he was Mr. John 
Morley) noted shrewdly that Emerson's poems were 
"too naked, unrelated, and cosmic; too little clad with 
the vestures of human associations." ^ The truth of 
this remark, if confined to the markedly philosophical 
* Morley, Critical Miscellanies, ii, 321 . 



284 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



1 



poems, is borne out by the shiver which accompanied' 
their perusal when the reader is sensitive. There is 
something disheartening, something homeless, in the 
inhospitable universe to which these personifications 
introduce us. They are not lugubrious : indeed they have 
plenty of sunshine of a sort; but it is the cheerless 
sunshine that falls upon emptiness, upon thinly settled 
prairies or unpeopled steppes. 

The fault does not lie so much in the mere absence 
of human associations as in the unfulfilled promise of 
vital relationships which is held out to us in the insti- 
tution of these spectral personalities. Emerson*s ab- 
stractions, when undisguised, are by no means uncon- 
genial; indeed, some of his noblest utterances in verse, 
such as the famous "The youth replies, I can," ^ are 
declarations of general truths in forms unmistakably 
general. Emerson could warm to an abstract truth, but 
not to the phantasm whom he engendered as its mouth- 
piece. Better a succulent abstraction, such as Emerson 
reared, than a juiceless personification. The truth is 
that, leaving out of view for the moment the question 
of verbal expression, and confining ourselves to the 
thoughts and images, the philosophical poems present 
ideas in forms more fantastic but at the same time less 
imaginative than those offered in the prose : to be bluntly 
candid, they are less poetical. 

V. Ascension 

At this point a pertinent question may be put: Grant- 
ing that a barrier subsists between Emerson's verse and 
* Poems, IX, 207. 



EMERSON AS POET 285 

the normal lover of poetry, may it not be a barrier of the 
same kind which prevents the schoolboy, heartily ap- 
preciative of "Horatius," "Ye Mariners of England," 
and "The Ballad of East and West," from finding any 
sustenance in "Tintern Abbey"? May not the culti- 
vated world, in relation to Emerson, be the schoolboy? 
The greatness, and the fineness, of the man entitle this 
remonstrance to a respectful hearing. 

It may be replied, however, that true verse does not 
readily elude the true lover of verse, even when the sub- 
ject is remote or uncongenial. After all, poetry works 
its subtlest effects by concrete means, picture and 
melody; and if a taste for picture and melody be origi- 
nally presupposed, it is hard to imagine that it would be 
quite nullified by the employment of picture and melody 
to convey abstruse or alien ideas. The authenticity of 
George Meredith's inspiration is recognizable by per- 
sons for whom the nature of his thought and expression 
offers insuperable barriers to the enjoyment of his verse. 
The insinuating yet at the same time planetary rhythm 
of Emerson's own "Brahma" reaches hearts incapable 
of response to the doubtful stimulus of its unaffecting 
thought. A second consideration is even more to the 
purpose. If in Emerson's philosophical poetry, a real 
enchantment is shorn of its due influence by the indif- 
ference of untutored minds to its themes, that indiffer- 
ence should be continuous as long as the subject is 
unchanged. But, in point of fact, the reading even of 
rather unsympathetic poems is crossed by moments of 
vivid imaginative pleasure. Can we account for these 
dots of sensation on a ground of relative insensibility 



286 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

except by supposing that they represent the momen- 
tary outleaps of the fitful imaginative energy in the soul 
of the poet? The truth of this suggestion is confirmed 
by the undoubted exhibition of the same inequahty in 
poems of a quite normal type — poems like the " Con- 
cord Ode " of 1857 — which the reader may approach 
without that chastening sense of dubious competence 
which "The Sphinx" or "The World-Soul" might con- 
ceivably inspire. 

The point is one on which dogmatism would be im- 
pertinence, but the evidence is against the hypothesis 
that Emerson's poetry is underestimated because its 
charm is abstruse. The facts point to the conclusion 
that, while his matter may be abstruse, his charm is 
palpable. 

VI. Distribution 

The main diflficulties in the poems of Emerson are 
two: want of organization (loosely designated by Arnold 
as want of concreteness),^ and want of imagination in 
the materials of the philosophical poems, when viewed 
broadly as masses of ideas. From these defects two re- 
sults might be conjectured: First, the shorter poems, 
where incoherence is less aggravated or less advertised, 
tend to be better than the larger ones, admitting the 
right of the critic who remembers "May-Day," the 
"Threnody," and "Voluntaries," to underscore or even 
to print in small capitals the word "tend." Second, the 
poems tend to improve in the ratio of their departure 
from philosophical ground, and their affiliation with 
1 Arnold, Discourses in America, 159. 



EMERSON AS POET 287 

normal human Interests, domestic, political, or descrip- 
tive. The interest of Emerson's verse, therefore, centres 
partly in that section of his poems in which an excep- 
tional method or a fortunate approach to actuality has 
suspended his normal inhibitions, and partly in the 
momentary but transcendent felicities which always 
star, and sometimes constellate, his entire work. 

We have divided the more normal poems into three 
groups: domestic ("Threnody"), political ("Concord 
Hynm"), and descriptive ("May-Day"). Add the 
philosophical poems, and the variety is honorable to an 
author whose work seems to most readers distinctly 
homogeneous. But subdivision need not pause here. 
The number of species in Emerson's verse is large in 
proportion to the number of poems. He is always doing 
something not quite like other people and not quite like 
himself. "Good-bye" ^ is solitary among his own and 
other poems, in virtue of its mixture of unconcern and 
earnestness; "The Problem,"^ the friendliest of his 
poems, is a species by itself. "Terminus" ^ stands ma- 
jestically aloof, and the mournful but sumptuous music 
of the "Voluntaries" * perished without reverberation. 
The "Threnody," ^ in its mingled abasement and exalta- 
tion, is insulated even from his pathetic verse. In the 
mountain and the squirrel anecdote he achieved and 
put by proficiency in fable.^ "The Amulet" ^ was his 
initial and final experiment in what one might call a 
sort of firmamental vers de societe. "The Adirondacs" ^ 

* Poems, IX, 3-4. 2 Poems, ix, 6-9. 

» Poems, IX, 251-52. ^ Poems, ix, 205-09. 

^ Poems, IX, 148-58. ® Poems, ix, 75. 

' Poems, IX, 98-99. ^ Poems, ix, 182-94. 



288 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

is a picture of comradesliip that has no companion in 
his works. "Wood-Notes" ^ naay be paired with **Mo- 
nadnoc," but only in a kind of "dual solitude." Where 
is the parallel to Brahma in spite of that person's con- 
tumacious insistence that the whole world is nothing 
but a repetition of himself? ^ "The Rhodora" hardly 
grew on the same slope which ripened "May-Day," ^ 
and the seeming brotherhood of the "Concord" and 
"Boston"^ hynms merges into a dubious cousinship. 

We noted not long since in Emerson's prose that the 
soil was astir with many varied impulses which rather 
heaved than actually broke the surface. It is interest- 
ing and confirmatory to note in the verse the reappear- 
ance, just below or just above the surface, of spring-like, 
manifold, germinative forces, still subject in part to the 
restraints of the withdrawing but unconquered force of 
the lingering Puritan winter. The returning heat has 
not quite dissolved the old numbness. 

VII. Star-Dust 

Emerson's second claim to eminence as a poet lies in 
the perfect though detached moments which the witch- 
ery of his music and phrase imparts to the sensitive 
and sympathetic reader. Of these enchantments, which 
even doubters and censors perceive, the frequency is 
moderate; the range is noteworthy; and the quality is 
incomparable. 

Emerson's rhythm had two forms, expressive of two 
aspects of his contrasted nature: a noble and weighty 

1 Poems, IX, 43-59, 60-75. 2 Poems, ix, 195. 

» Poems, IX, 37-38. 163-81. < Poems, ix, 158-59, 201-04. 



EMERSON AS POET 289 

blank verse in which his philosophic breadth and tran- 
quillity found fit and high embodiment, and an airy, 
springing, buoyant lyricism, in which freedom and rap- 
ture are the dominating notes. The contrast reminds us 
of the fact that the same hand wrote "Tin tern Abbey" 
and "The Daffodils.'* It is curious to observe, however, 
that Emerson has written no "Daffodils"; in other 
words he has written no short poem in several stanzas, 
in which the stanzas all dance to one tune. Just as, al- 
though intensely poetic, he had small aptitude for poems, 
so, although rich in lyricism, he scarcely wrote a typical 
lyric. His real lyrics, like the "Concord Hymn" are too 
stately to be typical, and the number of these is not 
large. His freer inspiration rarely pervades a poem; it 
is invasive rather than pervasive, and animates a coup- 
let, triplet, or quatrain with here and there a more ex- 
tended but still separable passage. 

The felicity may be obvious or recondite. Emerson 
can invest with witchery a line of which the beats are 
regular as clock-ticks, — 

"But if with gold she bind her hair," ^ 

or he can write lines in which only a delicate ear can 
extricate the fine kernel of melody from its husk of en- 
easing roughness. 

"The rain comes when the wind calls." ' 

The various notes in this diapason are distinct and 
varied enough to deserve a brief and, naturally, incom- 
plete enumeration. 

1 Poemsy IX, 51. ^ Poems, ix, 57. 



290 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

1. Vivacity: — 

•* Gayest pictures rose to win me. 
Leopard-colored rills." * 

"Over the winter glacieres 
I see the summer glow." ^ 

2. Mimetic sound: sometimes elementary but trans- 
porting: — 

"The red-wing flutes his o-korlee," ' 
Sometimes with mystic suggestion superadded: — 

"Or flutes which passing angels blew." * 
Or sometimes the mimicry is heavier and sterner: — 

"Chiming with the gasp and moan 
Of the ice-imprisoned flood." ® 

Or self -reverberant, in grandly spaced gradations: — 
"And fired the shot heard round the world." ® 

3. Impetuosity: — 

"And I will swim the ancient sea 
To float my child to victory." ^ 

"Will take the sun out of the skies 
Ere freedom out of man." ^ 

4. Awesomeness or mystery : — 

"By lonely lakes to men unknown." ^ 

"The whited desert knew me not," ^° 

"In the long sunny afternoon 

The plain was full of ghosts; " ** 

Only careful reading will evoke the fulness of sombre 
eloquence embosomed in the word "ghosts." 

1 Poems, IX, 60. ^ Poems, ix, 19. ^ Poems, ix, 169. 

* Poems, IX, 178. ^ Poems, ix, 120. ® Poems, ix, 158. 

^ Poems, IX, 150. ^ Poems, ix, 200. ^ PoemSt ix, 164. 

" Poems, IX, 164. " Poems, ix, 145. 



EMERSON AS POET 291 

5. Antiquity: — 

**01d as the sun, old almost as the shade; " * 

"Winds of remembering 
Of the ancient being blow," ^ 

"And matched his sufferance sublime 
The taciturnity of time." ' 

6. Elusiveness: — 

"What was that I heard 
Out of the hazy land?"* 

There are times when this question seems to be fit 
motto and exquisite summary for the whole of Emerson's 
verse. 

7. Pungency: The lines are sometimes heavy with 

aroma. 

"The South-wind brings 
Life, sunshine and desire. 
And on every mount and meadow 
Breathes aromatic fire; " ^ 

"The cordial quality of pear or plum 
Ascends as gladly in a single tree 
As in broad orchards resonant with bees; " ® 

Allied to this are lines of different theme but like 
quality, — slow, rich, absorptive, porous lines, — drain- 
ing the sources of some hidden opulence. 

"Nor cloy us with unshaded sun," ^ 
"Cold is genial and dear." ^ 

8. Exuberance : — 

"What joy in rosy waves outpoured 
Flows from the heart of Love, the Lord." ® 

1 Poems, IX, 67. » Poems, ix, 126. » Poems, ix, 273. 

* Poem^, IX, 163. ^ Poems, ix, 148. ^ Poems, ix, 143. 

^ Poems, IX, 167. ^ Poems, ix, 168. » Poems, ix, 169. 



292 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

" The litanies of nations came. 
Like the volcano's tongue of flame. 
Up from the burning core below, — " * 

9. Massiveness : — 

"The hand that rounded Peter's dome " ^ 

"To wait an aeon to be bom." ' 

" I am the doubter and the doubt. 
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings." * 

10. Suavity. He can write some of the most clinging, 
the most wooing, lines in literature: — 

"Daily the bending skies solicit man," ^ 

Or that other line of almost nuptial solemnity: — 

"The partial wood-gods overpaid my love," ® 

11. Pathos: — 

"But over the dead he has no power. 
The lost, the lost, he cannot restore; " "^ 

12. Gruesomeness : — 

" The ominous hole he dug in the sand," ^ 

We have not reached the end of the list, but the pa- 
tience of readers is sooner exhausted than the affluence 
of Emerson. Two qualities in the above series are 
especially conspicuous: the tingling, outleaping spon- 
taneity, remarkable in a nature which seemed calm and 
measured to the superficial eye and which arraigned it- 
self for sluggishness and hesitation; and the aromatic 
warmth and pungency, noteworthy in a character which 
was wont to deplore its want of hearty animal life, of 

* Poems, IX, 7. ^ Poems, rx, 7. » Poems, ix, 153. 

* Poems, IX, 195. ^ Poem^, rx, 190. ^ Poems, ix, 141. 
"^ Poems, IX, 148. ^ Poems, ix, 151. 



EMERSON AS POET 293 

soundness and exuberance of constitution. One further 
proof of the genuineness of his faculty must be set down. 
Nothing authenticates a poet more surely than the 
power to take an undistinguished word, and raise it in 
one magic stroke to something like empjrreal compass 
and dignity. Where in English is there a word more 
pedestrian, more lounging and unambitious, than the 
word "fellows".? Emerson can dilate it to cosmic di- 
mensions, and make it orchestral with music: — 

*'The caged linnet in the Spring 
Hearkens for the choral glee. 
When his fellows on the wing 
Migrate from the Southern Sea; " * 

Or if you love to watch the emergence of the butter- 
fly from the ruptured chrysalis, study the treatment of 
the word "hazy" in the closing line of the same stanza: 
"And o'er yon hazy crest is Eden's balmier spring." 

The variety in expansiveness which marks the fore- 
going series of quotations confirms the impression de- 
rived from a survey of the prose that in Emerson a na- 
ture of originally cabined and confined expression made 
a strong, self-transcending movement in the direction 
of expansiveness, variety, and freedom. That move- 
ment was in part successful, but both in the poetry and 
the prose was subject to an ultimate check. In the 
poetry, the check is not apparent in any limitation of 
the really marvellous spontaneity of individual lines or 
bits, but in the recurrence of constraint and awkward- 
ness in the intervals that divide these culminations. His 
captivity was often suspended, but the sentence was 

never revoked. 

1 PoejnSf IX, 166. 



294 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

VIII. Conclusion 

Where does poetry concentrate itself, affirm and 
realize itself most fully? In wholes or in particles? Let 
us leave out of the reckoning the great dramatists and 
epic writers to whom Emerson is virtually unrelated; 
let us confine ourselves to writers of lyrics and modest 
narrative, to the class represented by Herbert, Marvell, 
Gray, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Ros- 
setti, Alfred de Musset, Paul Verlaine, Heine, Carducci. 
Is the poetry of such men most evident in the large 
or in the little units? 

If we approach poetry from the side of literature, if 
we view it as thought and style with rhythm super- 
added, we shall find its quintessence in the final or total 
effect. But if we approach poetry from the standpoint 
of embodiment^ if we regard it as furnishing at the same 
time a physical and a moral impression coinciding in 
quality and effect, it is difficult to see how the whole 
can become the especial, the typical, seat of this coin- 
cidence. Is not the aggregate impression in poetry 
merely psychological? Do we find anywhere a physical 
total? Is the ear a reservoir of physical impressions? 
Does it accumulate soimds? Is not the truth rather 
that the mind accumulates sensations, each of which, 
on its entrance to the mind, was attended and enforced 
by a physical correlative? 

A narrative poem, even a poem so brief as "Days," 
has an organism — plot, proportion, adaptation, cli- 
max — which is distinct both from its total sentiment 
and from its verbal or rhythmical felicities. But is not 



EMERSON AS POET 295 

this organism a psychological fabric? Can we say that 
a frame of this kind, which is capable of satisfactory 
reproduction in a prose version in a foreign tongue, 
embodies the spirit of the whole work in anything ap- 
proaching to the vivid and intimate way in which "the 
moan of doves in immemorial elms" embodies the idea 
of which it is the mouthpiece? If poetry be the union 
of the physical and the moral effect, can that union be 
fully achieved or apprehended elsewhere than in the 
single stanza or brief passage? 

There are counter-pleas undoubtedly. It is possible 
to retire upon the first of the two definitions of poetry 
in the foregoing paragraphs. It is possible to affirm 
that, whatever poetry may be, a poem is an organism, 
and that the obligations which the mere poet eludes re- 
impose themselves upon the man of letters. It is, again, 
possible to contend that the end of verse is the merg- 
ing of many individual, minute, strictly poetical im- 
pressions in an ultimate impression absorptive of poetry 
and akin to poetry, though not really comprehended in 
the scope of the definition. These contentions are not 
baseless, but it remains probable that the mark of the 
pure love of poetry as such is an emphasis on particulars, 
that poetry is less effective in the continuity of reading 
than in the detachment of reminiscence, less effective* 
as Emerson himself would have said, in its own context 
than in citation in another's work. If a man utter 
a phrase like "burly, dozing humble-bee,'* ^ does it 
really matter so much whether he can repeat or sustain 
or enforce it in the succeeding lines or stanzas? The bee 
* Poems, IX, 38. 



'296 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

is there — the whole bee — in that satisfying and in- 
imitable line. What more does human nature want? 

It must be always remembered that Emerson's case 
does not rest wholly on detached beauties; the weight 
of a modest number of effective compositions must be 
added to his claims. The truth as to these claims is less 
recondite than the brisk contention that has sprung up 
on his status as a poet would lead one to suppose. When 
we say that a man is or is not a poet, we are simply 
defining by indirection the past and future experience 
of readers. Both clearness and harmony would be pro- 
moted by stating the facts directly in terms of the psy- 
chology of readers rather than indirectly in terms of the 
attributes of Emerson. Few people would contradict 
us if we affirmed that for minds in whom the instinct 
of sequence preponderates over the feeling for poetry, 
Emerson cannot perform the service of a high poet; 
while, contrariwise he can do the work of a high poet 
for minds in whom the poetic receptiveness is strong 
and the instinct for sequence merely normal or subnor- 
mal. This is tame beside the assertion that Emerson is a 
poet, with its pungent implications as to the intellectual 
capacity of various critics who affirm that he is not. 
It is tame, likewise, beside the assertion that Emerson 
is not a poet, with its delicate hint that the existence of 
an opposite view would justify the country in the en- 
largement of its resources for the care of the feeble- 
minded. The above affirmation of divided experience 
has no such contentious piquancy: it has merely the 
plain merit of stating with some precision an unexciting 
truth. 



CHAPTER VII 

Emerson's philosophy 
I. Experience 

The secret of Emerson may be conveyed in one word, 
the superlative, even the superhuman, value which he 
found in the unit of experience, the direct, momentary, 
individual act of consciousness. This is the centre from 
which the man radiates: it begets all and explains all. 
He may be defined as an experiment made by nature in 
the raising of the single perception or impression to a 
hitherto unimaginable value. 

From this point of view, the fact that he wrote jour- 
nals all his life, and that his published works are distil- 
lations of journals, acquires a quite novel significance. 
It is hard to believe that these grave volumes with their 
abstract themes are in essence a "Pepys* Diary," an 
ingathering of brief tinglings or stimulations. Such is, 
nevertheless, the fact. 

The sceptic who calls for Emerson's personal testi- 
mony may be readily satisfied. "A single thought has 
no limit to its value. " ^ "A rush of thoughts . . . the only 
conceivable prosperity." ^ "A man's whole possibility 
is contained in that habitual first look which he casts 
on all objects." ^ 

The sentences that compose the works are all, in a 

1 "Natural History of Intellect," xii, 40. 

2 Jour. X, 335. 3 "Instinct and Inspiration," xii, 66. 



298 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

sense, "tested recipes." They consist either of thoughts 
that, in actual experience, have yielded succulence, 
yielded stimulus, to their originator, or of intimations 
as to modes of procuring such thoughts; they are min- 
utes of results or suggestions of methods. Nay, the very 
methods are numbered among the stimuli. The doc- 
trine of "Self -Reliance," a guidepost to inspirations, is 
no less definitely an inspiration itself. So the lamp 
which makes beautiful objects apparent may be itself 
an object of beauty, and the stem (as in cauliflower) 
which supports an edible blossom may be itself edi- 
ble. 

The great value in life being thus established, the 
theory of the conduct of life is plain. Life is a quest of 
thoughts, a pursuit of inspirations. Beside these ends, 
land and goods and house and fame are nothing, and 
wife and child may count themselves lucky if they es- 
cape relegation to the class of baggage. Is this a con- 
suming egotism? Not as Emerson sees it, or in any sense 
which the vulgar can suspect. The reader's title to an 
explanation on this point will be satisfied later. Mean- 
while, let us remember that, for Emerson all values, 
even truth- values, are experimental; nothing counts that 
is not enjoyable, consumable, digestible; even knowl- 
edge is either nutriment or refuse. 

II. Logic 

We must bear in mind steadily that this experience 
is not massed or blocked; its field is the moment; it is 
nuclear or particular, or, to get the pith from the ety- 
mology, subsisting in particles. Hence this isolative 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 299 

philosophy is unfriendly to logic, which is synthetic and 
comprehensive. We might dismiss the case briefly by 
saying that the Emersonian view is atomic, while logic 
is molecular. But this is too figurative and too curt: a 
further explanation is desirable. 

The man and the percept (the nutrient, the stimula- 
tive, percept) — that is the reality, that is the world. 
Anything that interposes between the direct contact of 
man and percept is an obstacle to be brusquely pushed 
aside. Now what does logic do? It furnishes the reason 
or argimaent; that is, it offers a truth which you cannot 
directly digest or enjoy, as the needful preliminary to 
another truth in whose digestible and enjoyable prop- 
erties you may find compensation later on. It is the 
secretary in the outward oflSce whom you do not per- 
sonally care to see, but who is your sole means of access 
to the jealously guarded inner sanctum that enshrines 
the object of your search. But Emerson, for whom the 
direct experience is imperative, has no patience with 
niggling preliminaries and officious mediators. He 
strides past the offended secretary, to the consternation 
of the formal habitues of the well-drilled establishment, 
and finds himself without warning or permit in the cabi- 
net of the great man. To defend this procedure is not 
our present business : we are content if we can make it 
intelligible. 

Emerson, then, is disinclined to logic; he does not care 
to be delayed or to be bored. But the folly of critics, en- 
couraged by a word of his own, has converted this dis- 
inclination into incapacity. Emerson did write in 1838 
to Henry Ware: "For I do not know what arguments 



SOO RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

mean in reference to any expression of a thought."^ 
Now this is, in the parlance of our forefathers, " mighty 
pretty." If there existed in the language of the angels 
some celestial equivalent for that useful Americanism, 
"bluff," and we could come at that word, we should 
deprecatingly and reverently apply it to that particular 
sentence in Emerson's admirable letter to Henry Ware. 
The sentence begins with a shameless "for"; moreover, 
the convenience of infirmity is only too palpable: if you 
are without hands, people cannot ask you to split their 
firewood. 

Emerson was, in fact, perfectly capable of using the 
syllogism, the nucleus of all deductive logic, and of 
writing, when he chose, an argumentative discourse. 
The sermon on the Lord's Supper, as Moncure D. Con- 
way rightly avers, is a perfectly clear example of " con- 
secutive logical reasoning." ^ The letters to Aunt Mary 
in the time of his theological novitiate ^ and the "Jour- 
nals" of the same period should remove any doubts of 
Emerson's capacity from the mind of any critic who 
retains the capacity himself. There is argument in good 
measure in the anti-slavery speeches, and the "Ameri- 
can Civilization" address in Washuigton (to which 
Moncure D. Conway is said to have furnished sugges- 
tions) is almost unmixed argument.^ The second essay 
on "Art," in "Society and Solitude," is a rare but preg- 
nant instance of the dedication of an essay to the sup- 

1 Cabot, n, 693. 

2 Conway, 72. But see Dr. Emerson's note on this address. Works, 
XI, 550. 

' Cabot, I, 103-06. 

* "American Civilization,'* xi, 297-311; Jour, ix, 373 note. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY SOI 

port of a unified thesis. The lecture on "The Conserva- 
tive" is mainly occupied with an impartial and forcible 
debate.^ Even the essays proper are not chary of rea- 
sons, and what is an argument but a reason under fire? 
Mr. Brownell points misgivingly to the absence of 
"therefores," ^ j^ut one can reason all day without a 
"therefore" as one can command all day without a 
"shall." In the Tufts College speech ^ there is an ex- 
press dilemma. The man is even capable of putting a 
syllogism with all three of its parts, premises and con- 
clusion, into a rhymed stanza: — 

**Pay ransom to the owner 
And fill the bag to the brim. 
"Who is the owner? The slave is owner. 
And ever was. Pay him." ^ 

Emerson's failure in mathematics and his avoidance 
of metaphysics (which might naturally have fallen in his 
way) may be readily explained without the contumeli- 
ous insinuation that he was disqualified for drawing an 
inference. It is probably not so much the laboriousness 
as what we might call the asceticism of these alpine 
sciences that makes them redoubtable to many minds. 
The reason is not overtasked, but the imagination and 
the sensibilities are underfed. Now if a mind ever existed 
in which the appetite of these latter faculties was per- 
sistent and insatiable, it was the mind of Emerson. In 
the face of the "impossible analytical geometry" and 
(we may fairly suppose) of the "Critique of Pure Rea- 
son," he was not beaten: he was starved. 

1 "The Conservative," i, 295-326. 

2 Brownell, American Prose Masters, 143. 

« Works, XII, 115. * Poems, ix, 204. 



302 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

The same need is the source of a real disability in 
Emerson which people have mistakenly identified with 
the incapacity to infer the unknown from the known. 
When a subject has yielded many considerations, some 
pro, some contra, some divided, some ambiguous, the 
task of holding all these points simultaneously in mind, 
of noting how they abet, retrench, or ojffset one another, 
and of finally striking the balance, becomes trouble- 
some to the intellect and arid to the imagination. The 
"standing together" of things, the consistency, lay out 
of reach of his ability and even of his aspiration. As an 
advocate, he might have made a shift to offer a plea; as 
a judge he could hardly have summed up the evidence. 

III. Conflux 

Our analysis has advanced two steps : we have found 
the secret of Emerson in the ascendency of the unit 
of experience, and we have related this unit to the mis- 
stated and exaggerated incapacity for reasoning. The 
next step is to fix the contents of this unit. What con- 
stituted this perception? What measured its value and 
significance? 

There are four immemorial routes of human aspira- 
tion, definable for us still under the ancient names of 
beauty, truth, virtue, and God. The pursuits correlative 
with these ends are known as art, science, morality, and 
religion. A man fitted to raise experience to its highest 
power must be profoundly responsive to all four ap- 
peals, — a proposition which is verified in Emerson. 
But a further question arises: Which is primary? Which 
lends most vividness and meaning to perception? No 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 303 

man can answer that question for mankind; but if you 
are the descendant of an heroic line of godly and dedi- 
cated men, if you are born in Boston in 1803, if you are 
nobly tempered and are highly and austerely reared, 
the chances that in your scale of values religion will be 
first are very high. The point we here reach is capital : 
religion is primary and authoritative; it is the stand- 
ard by nearness to which, or association with which, 
all other assets and faculties must be gauged. 

What becomes of the three other pursuits by this 
standard? Ethics, clearly, are safe; the Good is either 
fused with the Divine or is united with it in the most 
intimate of partnerships. God — to some men a mere 
synonym for virtue — is, at worst, its inspirer, its sggis, 
and its pattern: and the moral traits are not merely 
beneficent but holy; the reflection of the divine beam 
brightens their native lustre. But how stands it with 
these two other seemingly quite distinct though not 
unfriendly puissances of truth and beauty? The origi- 
nality of Emerson may be said to lie in the fact that the 
same intimacy of relation which the consent of mankind 
had established between Deity and ethics he proceeded 
to set up between Deity and truth, between Deity and 
beauty. 

The abstract hypothesis of a common source for 
truth, beauty, and goodness in the divine being is, of 
course, long prior to Emerson. Metaphysics is hardly 
an alert science, but, between its dreary paucity of 
topics and its strong propensity for unification, it could 
hardly fail to stumble upon the idea that truth and 
beauty, clearly elements of the world, should be declara- 



304 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

tions or manifestoes of the power that holds the world 
in its grasp. The simple yet mighty innovation brought 
forth by Emerson was to set this idea to work, to base 
life on this proposition, not merely to affirm but to dis- 
cover — and re-discover a thousand times — the divine 
principle in particular experiences of truth and beauty. 
Not abstraction, but extraction, is the word that de- 
fines his originality. A reservation must be made, how- 
ever, in favor of the priority of Wordsworth in the 
utilizing of landscape for this purpose. Both he and 
Emerson had a remarkable capacity for sitting down in 
the plainest, sturdiest fashion to live out a great ideal 
year by year and second by second. 

The confluence of beauty and truth with religion is 
not remote or prospective: it is wrought, for Emerson, 
here and now. He is not put off with mere evidence that 
the four great routes of human aspiration lead eventu- 
ally to one goal. That goal itself is a delight of the jour- 
ney: the "far blue eye" of the mountain peak toward 
which several highways converge becomes visible from 
every point of each route as a solace and inspiration 
both to eye and heart. 

If a man is born to sublimate the moment- — each 
moment, and he loves one thing best, it is clear that 
every moment must be made a sharer in the thing he 
most loves. The exquisite address with which nature 
solved her problem — for, be it clearly understood, it is 
not Emerson's conscious problem but nature's problem 
in rearing an Emerson that is solved in these delicate 
combinations — has been made clear in the facts of the 
foregoing paragraphs. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 305 

IV. Sensibility 

Pictures and song will teach religion to no man who 
has not first loved song and pictures for their own sake. 
Truth and beauty cannot be made the occasions of 
religious profit to a soul that has not first prized them 
as truth and beauty. It is good politics to send an am- 
bassador who is friendly with the receiving state, but 
the friendship must precede the embassy. Take out the 
religious bias, and the disinterested passion — the pas- 
sion for mere truth, mere beauty — would have suf- 
ficed still to make Emerson remarkable. 

This plain New Englander has strange utterances on 
the point of beauty. " Crossing a bare common, in snow 
puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky," he is "glad 
to the brink of fear." ^ He beholds the morning "with 
emotions which an angel might share." ^ There is "no 
disgrace, no calamity" (leaving him his eyes), "which 
nature cannot repair." ^ One suspects that in mere 
receptiveness — putting creation aside — he rivalled 
Spenser or Shelley. A trail of the purple, a kingliness 
as it were, marks his appropriation to his use of the 
grandeurs of the external world. An eye for landscape 
and for persons and an ear for poetry were the two 
points in which the organic sensibility quickened to the 
verge of rapture. The point of interest for us now is the 
strength and fineness of this primitive sensation. 

On the side of truth, likewise, not merely the prophet 
in Emerson but the natural man was pervaded by a 
hunger for facts. His demand for entertainment — 

1 "Nature," i, 9. 2 "Nature," i, 17. » "Nature," i, 10. 



S06 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

high-class entertainment undoubtedly — was persist- 
ent and insatiable. He had the busiest as well as the 
profoundest of minds; he packed the day with impres- 
sions: succession, variety, surprise were indispensable 
to his well-being. He needed news like a clubman, 
though the news might belong, if you liked, to Nineveh 
in the pre-Christian era. Hence his impatience of vacui- 
ties, human or other, and his impalement of bores and 
pedants on the point of his versatile pen. Hence his 
interest in the acquisition of fact, and his power to erect 
that interest into a flag of truce beneath which he could 
converse amicably with persons who might have found 
his general views inscrutable or ridiculous. The curi- 
osity seems to have widened as he matured and to have 
strengthened rather than failed with the advent of old 
age. His requisitions were so great that he became for 
their sake the pattern of observers; hunger cultivates 
alertness. 

When we have once grasped the force of this impulse 
in the mere heathen Emerson, so to speak, we are pre- 
pared for the magnitude of the result when the devout 
Emerson confers on every fact the added force of a 
religious value. 

V. Universality 

The words "every fact" in the last sentence were 
used advisedly. Beauty controls only one section of 
life, but truth is all-embracing. Every fact, then, is 
endued with the capacity to furnish religious suste- 
nance to man. 

The mere declaration of the possibility is futile. It 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 307 

differs from practice quite as much as the assertion of 
vague suzerainty over a vast continent differs from the 
actual collection of tribute in the form of corn or gold 
or wine. The point in Emerson's case is that the tribute 
was actually collected. 

He made no exception. As in Judea, at the birth of 
Jesus, the whole world must be taxed. He took in the 
industrial fact (the farm is a mute gospel, and ethics 
sparkle on the chisel edge); ^ the homely fact ("What! 
has my stove and pepperpot a false bottom ") ; ^ the 
commercial fact (even political economy is a "Bible"); ^ 
the jarring fact; the cruel fact; even the obscene fact,* 
which, as he clearly tells us, shall be summoned to offer 
its testimony. The peculiarity of Emerson might be 
defined in these terms: he brought into the service of 
the religious instinct a larger amount and greater vari- 
ety of material than was ever applied to that function 
by any other of the sons of men. He is supreme in the 
magnitude of his resources. 

It is not to be overlooked that he had at his beck and 
call a collector of unexampled efficiency — the nine- 
teenth century. But the rarer good fortune lay in the 
coincidence of an extraordinary mental activity with a 
perfectly clear perception of the bearing of every form 
of mental activity on the nourishment of the religious 
sense. 

A strong religious bent in former ages faced an un- 
pleasing alternative. If the devout man wished to give 

* "Nature," i, 42; "Compensation," ii, 115. 

2 "Beauty," vi, 304. 3 "Wealth," vi, 89. 

* "The Poet," iii, 17. 



308 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



n 



himself exclusively to his vocation, he withdrew to the 
cloister or the desert, shut out the world, and rigidly 
narrowed his activity; this led to the starving of his life, 
and even finally to the shrivelling of the religious in- 
stinct itself in the general atrophy of manhood. If, on the 
contrary, he continued his life in the world, his religion 
was confined to one precinct of his existence, or merely 
served, like watch or compass, as an occasional guide or 
corrective, in the conduct of secular pursuits. But the 
moment we give to every pursuit a religious bearing, the 
rigor of this alternative is abated. It becomes theo- 
retically possible for an exclusively religious nature to 
pm-sue an exclusively religious life in the midst of the 
animating and stimulative variety of secular surround- 
ings. 

We say, theoretically possible; for limitations are 
quick to show themselves in practice. The advanced 
religionist is no more secure of his power of extracting 
spiritual nutriment from a given object or event than 
the conservative worshipper is sure of invariable refresh- 
ment from the conventional apparatus of prayers and 
sermons. Fortune and mood are participant in both 
cases. Moreover, it is only in retrospect or recession 
that action yields its contemplative values to the faith- 
ful; the deed is legible only in the memory. Emerson, 
by the bye, has spoken exaltingly of action in "The 
American Scholar," ^ and doubtfully or slightingly of it 
in other places; but his attitude remains entire and 
harmonious. The thought, the perceptive moment, is 
supreme: action as a spur to thought is invaluable; but 
1 "The American Scholar/' 94-100. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY S09 

action as a consequence or expression of thought is 
immaterial; ^ it is merely thought republished in large 
capitals. 

Inequality, then, the mark of all authentic emotional 
life, is stamped upon Emerson's spiritual experience. 
We like to think of him as calm, and the word no doubt 
fits his demeanor, but his life in fact mimicked the haz- 
ard and vicissitude of the gamester's. Day by day he 
played for high stakes, — the insights which summed up 
human values for him, — sometimes winning, more often 
losing, always uncertain, ranging the whole scale from 
exultation to despondency. His life had the dramatic 
poignancy proper to the artist's or the adventurer's — 
to all lives, in short, in which the scope of fortune and 
the uncertainty are both great. 

The extraction of spiritual good from the order of 
nature, from things at large, is not the most facile of 
undertakings. The cult favors reverence, perhaps, but 
hardly devotion. Churches — both in the architectural 
and the institutional sense — are enclosed; for enclos- 
ure — in its literal and its symbolic meaning — fosters 
piety. To make an Emerson, piety had to be raised to 
an unexampled intensity under the nurture of the aus- 
picious Christian dispensation, and then transferred in 
undiminished fulness to the forms of divinity supplied 
by the broad cosmos. It is very doubtful if the cosmos 
was ever so worshipped before, if, without this transfer, 
it could evoke this ardor of piety. Piety of a kind is dis- 
cernible in the religious attitude of Plato and Plotinus 
who evolved their cosmic deity from their private feel- 
» "Spiritual Laws," ii, 161. 



SIO RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



1 



ing and Intelligence; but its flame is slender beside the 
Emersonian blaze. Shelter before exposure, the seed- 
ling in the hothouse, the embryo in the womb, • — shelter 
as the condition that insures safety and thrift in sub- 
sequent liberation, — that is, the law obeyed in the 
rearing of Emerson. 

This transference to one mode of faith of a set of feel- 
ings proper to another has a quite special bearing on the 
applicability of the Emersonian cult to men in whom 
this powerful primary charge of Puritan Christianity is 
wanting. It is by no means true that Emerson's later 
faith subsisted on the savings of his Puritanism, that 
he spent day by day his waning accumulations. His 
religion was a self-supporting enterprise, not a hoard, 
but capital actively employed and supplying dividends 
far more punctually than his precarious investments 
in bank stock or railways. The business, however, was 
of that not xmusual kind which only a large initial out- 
lay could have rendered lucrative. The lesson to the 
penniless is clear. 

VI. Reconstruction 

The apt moment has now come for replying to an ob- 
jection which may have crossed the minds of thought- 
ful readers at our first affirmation that the cardinal point 
in Emerson was the aggrandizement of the single experi- 
ence. The aggrandizement of the unit of consciousness, 
of the moment, it may be asked, — is that a step in 
advance, and not rather the extreme of recrudescence? 
That is pagan, that is barbarous, that is infantine, that 
is animal. True, in a sense; but let us distinguish. To 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 811 

these lower types, the moment is everything, but, even 
so, it is little. To Emerson, it is not merely all ; it is 
much. The return to concentration in the moment is 
effected under conditions which make the moment worth 
far more than it ever was or could have been to those 
who had never left its precinct. The race has been edu- 
cated by previsions and retrospects and, thus fortified, 
it reverts to the emphasis on the present experience. The 
man has come back to his childish starting-place, but he 
comes prepared to enrich it with the spoils and trophies 
of his voyage round the world. 

VII. ICONOCLASM 

The supreme good is the integrity of the moment. The 
relation between the man and his perception is sacred, 
and whatever interposes between the two is noxious and 
profane. It is clear, then, that the impression of yester- 
day has no right to invade or impair the impression of 
to-day. At a stroke, therefore, we are rid of the bug- 
bear of consistency.^ 

Truth is not, as the common view supposes, a whole 
built up of tiny increments to which the moments suc- 
cessively contribute. Each moment, on the contrary, is 
a band encircling the whole of truth. Conceive, if you 
will, a celestial sphere in which the moments are great 
circles, equal to one another yet distinct, each engir- 
dling an entire globe and the same globe. 

But if not even a man's past experience is to intervene 
between himself and his percept, how much less the ex- 
perience, past or present, of any other man ! To imitate 
1 "Self-Reliance," ii, 56-60. 




312 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

or conform is to subordinate my sense of things to an- 
other man's, to admit an alien or profane element into 
that private and sacred session which I hold with my 
present thought. 

Does this rule lose its force if the other man be great? 
No. If the consensus of mankind supports his teaching? 
No. If he be lifted to the post of demigod, and the ages 
march in his retinue? No. 

It is quite plain that the apparently harmless thesis 
we have been advocating contains in its implications the 
doom of historical Christianity. Only one thing could 
preserve that institution. We are not bound to originate 
all our ideas; we are only bound to test them. If an idea 
broached by another mind fits us, feeds us, aids us, our 
license of appropriation is unbounded. But if an issue, 
a disparity arises, the claim of our private feeling to 
precedence is absolute. 

There came, in point of fact, a period in Emerson 
when he found himself increasingly unresponsive to the 
Unitarian orthodoxy in which he had been reared. He 
was in no haste to put that teaching by. On the con- 
trary, he seems to have kept his old Unitarian creed and 
his new cosmic faith side by side in his mind for a con- 
siderable period, as one keeps an aging and respectable 
servant in the house by the side of a younger, abler, but 
unproved domestic. The figure of service is apt, be- 
cause with Emerson these creeds were not two theories 
whose truth was in question, but two methods to be 
tested for efficiency. Which would yield more of the 
right kind of moments? — that was all. When, at last, 
the decision came, he rejected Unitarianism in precisely 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 313 

the same spirit in which a capitalist withdraws his funds 
from an investment of which the returns are diminish- 
ing or a housewife gives over a stove which has ceased 
to perform good service. The question of the abstract 
plausibility, consistency, or defensibility of the proposi- 
tions was a thing of no interest: in our vigorous vulgar 
parlance he ** wanted the goods." 

VIII. Self-Reliancb 

Was the change thus described a "crisis"? The com- 
plete absence of any hint of uneasiness from the pub- 
lished works, even from the recent "Journals," would 
suggest that the alteration was noiseless and placid. 
On the other hand, a single circumstance — single but 
powerful — indicates that this change of base was the 
poignant event of Emerson's life. That circumstance is 
the extreme and surprising prominence given forever 
after in his philosophy to the doctrine of "Self -Reli- 
ance." 

Extreme and surprising, for, in a calm estimate, what 
is self-reliance? It is not the beatific vision for which 
and in which (to the measure of his power) Emerson 
lived; it is not patriotism, liberty, holiness, God, self- 
sacrifice, justice, love, nor any other of the great human 
watchwords that count their roll of poets and martyrs. 
If it holds an honorary place among the major virtues, 
it must thank Emerson for its canonization. Its position 
among moral traits is rather that of the manly yeoman 
among lords and gentlefolk, sincerely esteemed but 
scarcely made much of. Moreover, for Emerson himself, 
1 its office is mediate or instrumental. Had he foimd the 



314 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

same benefits to arise from imitation or conformity, 
there is no reason to doubt bis ready acquiescence in the 
shift of means. Yet this mere instr ment receives a 
space and stress in his writings five times as great as 
justice, or love, or heroism, or any other of the high 
purposes of existence. 

The world and Emerson are pretty well agreed that 
a strong man is boimd to obey his best judgment and 
insight against the opposition of society. Most thought- 
ful men will probably agree that to substitute for the 
phrase, "Follow your insight," addressed to the strong 
man, the phrase, "Follow your instinct," addressed to 
everybody, is an infelicitous and even reckless mode of 
giving emphasis to a plain truth. The reason for the 
substitution is fairly clear. To say, "Obey your in- 
stincts," is revolutionary; to say, "Obey your higher 
instincts," an equally feasible and far more exact phrase, 
is banal; every automaton and every hypocrite will say 
as much. In the choice of the more striking and more 
questionable phrase, Emerson "obeyed his instinct," 
turning precept itself into example. 

His fearlessness in sanctioning instincts is of course 
explicable in part by the decorum of his own character. 
Take the four instincts which are hardest to manage and 
most destructive when uncurbed: the love of food and 
drink, ^ sex, anger, cupidity. There is reason, both in 
abstract probability and in concrete evidence, to believe 
that no one of these gadflies ever seriously troubled 
Emerson. Still, after all explanations, his unconcern is 
a little baffling. To take that troublesome matter of sex, 

1 E. in C. 152-55. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 315 

for instance: could even a saint, who was male as well 
as saint, have grown from babyhood to manhood with- 
out facing one or two occasions when instinct urged the 
clearly inexpedient and unrighteous thing? And, in the 
face of even one such warning, could he have nerved 
himself to write the equivocating word "instinct" when 
all he meant was "intuition"? 

The value of the defence of self-reliance does not rest 
in the teaching; in that teaching, doctrines which most 
men, in our day at least, would admit beforehand to 
be true are embodied in forms which many men would 
concede to be questionable. The value, which is great, 
lies almost wholly in the impulsion. The direction is 
obvious enough, but the pressure is unexampled. 

The doctrine is itself subject to one qualification or 
caveat. The precept of self-reliance is a pungent bit of 
autobiography; Emerson made a private experiment 
and published the results. Test everything for yourself, 
he says. Precisely, but why not, then, test self-reliance? 
Why accept as authoritative and universal even a law 
that declares that no authority is legitimate and that no 
rule is universal? Let the thoughtful disciple, instead 
of taking Emerson's result as a postulate, which smacks 
far too much of the reviled imitation and dependence, 
rather take Emerson's conduct as an example, and find 
out by personal experiment whether adhesion to counsel 
and custom or obedience to impulse is the profitable 
alternative in his own life. It is quite conceivable that 
the adhering or dependent instinct might be the domi- 
nant instinct in certain beings; nature made barnacles 
as well as fishes. 



316 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Let us, then, set down this truth in plain terms: 
Emerson believed that each man was the sole judge and 
arbiter of his own good. The full meaning of this propo- 
sition will appear in the sequel. 

IX. Impedimenta 

We return, again, to the supremacy of the all-inclu- 
sive moment. Two things contest that supremacy, 
space and time. The combat is interesting. 

The moment declares that its scope is all-embracing. 
Space ridicules this assumption, declares that the single 
experience is confined to a petty spot of ground on a 
great planet which is itself an infinitesimal particle in 
the dim reach of a boundless universe. Time, quite as 
roughly, insists that the status of the moment is des- 
picable; insignificant in the stretch of a year, it is below 
even insignificance in the compass of a century, which 
again is a mote or dust-film in respect of the unmeasured 
and unconceived eternity. This is contumelious usage. 
If the single experience is to hold up its head, it is clear 
that it must get rid of time and space. 

The Germans, fortunately, have been beforehand with 
us, and have taken down the conceit of these bullies. 
They have shown that time and space are mere forms 
for the setting forth, in commodious order and distinct- 
ness, of the real truths that concern the intelligence, 
counters, if you please, for the display of goods, or 
blackboards on which the great power that educates us 
draws pictures and diagrams illustrative of basic truths. 
Emerson drew in this teaching eagerly; his originality 
lay mostly in applications, and it is doubtful if any mind 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 317 

ever lived that succeeded better in freeing itself from the 
obsession of these bugbears. He speaks of time and 
space indeed as he might of Jack and Jill or Little Bo- 
peep or like figures of nursery legend which the growing 
lad discards with other playthings. Of course, no man 
— not even Emerson — can ignore time and space in 
the daUy conduct of life. In his Walden walks, his legs 
had to give strict account of every yard of space quite 
as surely as those of the sturdiest farmer in Concord, and 
his punctuality at the dinner hour seems to have put 
him in a position to comment satirically on the tardiness 
of his household.^ But, in his contemplative moments, 
perhaps even from boyhood, the power of likeness over 
his mind was so extraordinary that distance in time and 
space between two like objects became a negligible and 
despicable thing. 

This eclipse of distance, spatial or temporal, became 
a real aid, in some respects, to his philosophy. In the 
first place, it wiped out the interval between himseK and 
the Neo-Platonists, between himself and the Orientals, 
and made them, to all intents and purposes, coevals. 
Again, his scorn of time enabled him to realize as men 
have rarely done the plasticity and fluidity of institu- 
tions, and to make clear and near to his prophetic eye 
ameliorations which seemed fabulous to men who saw 
them in the dim perspective of the future. 

A third consequence was, or should have been, not 

the settlement, but the abolition, of the problem of 

immortality, the annihilation in this case choosing the 

question instead of the questioner for its victim. Dura- 

1 Jour. VI, 475. 



318 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

tion or perpetuity is inconceivable in the absence of 
time. Emerson, as we have seen, had a divided mind on 
the question of the future life. There were times when 
he was content to accept the expansibility of the moment 
to heroic or supernal dimensions as a full equivalent for 
inamortality.^ There were other times when he fixed his 
eyes on the expansibility of the individual, and felt that 
nothing less than infinite time would suffice to bridge the 
abyss between his capacities and his attainments. ^ He 
indulges, in "Immortality," the "low curiosity" which 
he censured in "The Over-Soul." ^ "A man of thought 
is willing to die, willing to live," ^ he courageously af- 
firms; but it is plain that he desires perpetuity, an atti- 
tude which, if immortality is to be viewed as a further- 
ance to experience, his temper made inevitable. 

Remove, then, these cramps of time and space, and 
the moment, the point, rises to its full altitude. The 
Now seems brief because it is empty; "pack it, and its 
bulk augments. The generosity of the moment is limited 
only by our receptiveness. The object of more time 
is more life, — an end which intensity meets quite as 
effectually as duration. 

X. Reason 

This deletion of time and space is intolerable to the 
hodman; it is foreign even to the philosopher in his ac- 
tive or pedestrian moods. ^ It follows that the two parts 
of his life seem unreal and chimerical to each other. A 

1 "The Over-Soul," ii, 282-85. « "Immortality/' viii, 338-39. 
8 "The Over-Soul," n, 283-84. •* "Immortality," viii, 329. 
6 "Nature," i. 49. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY ?19 

man uses two pairs of spectacles. Tlie first declare that 
the horizon and the distant mountains are a meaning- 
less blur, and that the printed page, ten inches from the 
eye, is made up of intelligible characters. The second 
affirm that the printed page is a foolish confusion, and 
that the horizon and the peaks are forms of clear and 
impressive beauty. It is quite plain that in the explana- 
tion of these disparities the man is greatly aided by the 
undeniable fact of the existence of the two instruments. 
If the changes occurred in a vision unaided by lenses, 
the bewilderment would be almost irremediable. 

In precisely the same fashion, this double attitude of 
the mind toward time and space and possibly toward 
other notions would be greatly simplified by the postu- 
late of two instruments or compartments or faculties in 
the mind, each of which should take charge of one class 
of material. The industrious Germans have once more 
anticipated our demands: they have distinguished be- 
tween the Understanding, an efficient factotum or bailiff 
who takes care of all the ordinary business of life, and 
the Reason which applies itself to the seizure of absolute 
truth. Our own period, which is disposed to make a 
puddle of the mind, and even to confound mind and 
matter is a mush, takes little interest in the separation 
of the intelligence into faculties, but to Emerson, par- 
ticularly in his younger days, when the doctrine reached 
New England from Germany via Coleridge, it wore the 
aspect of a release, an inspiration. " I think it a philos- 
ophy itself," he writes to Edward in 1834. i 

The absence of inspired books, which resulted from 
1 Cabot. I, 218. 



320 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Emerson's relinquishment of the chm*chly attitude 
toward the Bible, may have urged the young seeker to 
accept a substitute in an inspired /ac2/%- At all events 
the idealist with an eye for facts will clearly find a 
special convenience in the notion of two distinct planes 
of life and intellect, to one of which he can remand the 
whole ragged regiment of troublesome and disreputable 
facts, while he reserves the other inviolate for his tran- 
quillities and his optimisms. Man errs, but the Reason 
is infallible. Man sins, but the Reason finds sin merely 
negative. Man dies, but the Reason is deathless. To 
the senses nature is absolute; to the Reason it is pro- 
visional.^ The superstitions of theology are merely the 
distortions which the truths of Reason undergo when 
they descend into the sphere of Understanding, — the 
refraction or crooking of the stick as it passes from air 
into water. 2 

The sphere of Reason is truth, justice, love, and the 
other timeless abstractions. Its participation gives 
value to the momentary experience, yet it refuses coim- 
tenance to time and space; its interest is confined to 
perpetuities. How strangely different, from this point 
of view, appears that absorption in the moment which 
we foimd to be central and primary in Emerson! The 
moment keeps its preeminence, but its content is eternity. 

In the essays on Montaigne, Emerson remarks that we 
may coimt upon something like half a dozen reasonable 
hours in fifty years.^ So low an estimate is incredible in 
his own case. It may be not useless to add, that, while 

1 "Nature," i, 49-50. « "Address," i, 129. 

3 "Montaigne," iv, 178-79. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 321 

he never abandoned the distinction between the Reason 
and the Understanding, the value he set on it appears 
to have waned with time. The index to the "Journals " 
contains fifteen formal references under the heading 
"Reason." Fourteen of these belong to the first five 
volumes of the ten- volume edition, and the reader's im- 
pression supports this arithmetic. 

XI. Illusion 

If a man lives on two planes, one plane will absorb 
more of his life than the other, and the draft of things 
upon our life is one great measure of their reality. The 
rebirth in his consciousness of the old Platonic, the old 
Hindoo, theory of illusion becomes inevitable. 

The average man, absorbed in the concrete, finds 
abstractions chimerical. Emerson, living always more 
deeply in the abstract, found the busy, noisy, saucy 
march of life more and more of a game and puppet-play. 
From the paring of one's nails to the establishment of a 
railroad, from the harvesting of one's Seckels to the elec- 
tion of a president, the movement of life became pic- 
torial, illustrative, and unsubstantial. This feeling had 
that peculiar sureness and massiveness which inhered in 
all his convictions, and one of the quaintest and pret- 
tiest anecdotes that are told of him represents him as 
saying to a group of friends whom he had left for a mo- 
ment to settle the disposition of a load of wood: "We 
have to attend to these matters just as if they were 
real." ^ 

Let us try to define more sharply this reality. Within 
1 Albee, Remembrances of Emerson, 104. 



322 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

us and without us lies a force that we may call law or 
spirit or deity or Over-Soul, or pretty much anything 
we like that is not shackling or restrictive. The dis- 
interested recognition of this law is reality in perception ; 
the disinterested fulfilment of this law is reality in con- 
duct. Other perceptions, other conduct, are unreal. A 
tree as a tree is nothing; but to be there in the earth, to 
be what and as it is, certain laws had to be obeyed; as 
a clew to those laws, it is real. It would touch reality 
again, if it became the occasion for the fulfilment of laws 
by human beings. Wife and child are real only in this 
sense; I am real only as I see and obey this law. The 
intensest joys, the keenest agonies, are real only so far 
as they become contributors to wisdom or occasions to 
virtue, — a fact which throws light on Emerson's dis- 
position to take suffering somewhat lightly. In the 
searching essay on "Experience"^ he complains — a 
strange word in this context but precise — of the failure 
of even disasters like the death of his son to touch the 
springs of reality in his mind. 

It will be seen that this outlook on life is simple. 
Clear it is not — the majority would find it unintelligible; 
concrete it is not: but simple^ fixing itself unalterably 
upon one object, without division of eye or of aim — - it 
emphatically is. The life which expressed this attitude 
was simple likewise. 

XII. Equations 

We have yet more to say of the law mentioned in the 
last section. The truth on this point is various, and to 
1 " Experience," iii, 48-49. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY S23 

express this variety without the appearance of self- 
contradiction is difficult. The attempt, however, cannot 
be evaded. 

Emerson, after putting aside verbal revelation and 
rejecting miracle as "monster," ^ came to have a dis- 
tinct relish for the perfect mechanic regularity of a quite 
undeviating universe. He enjoyed the sureness of 
mechanism, and one doubts if he hated the austerity of 
mathematics any more than he loved its precision. Fail- 
ure in analytical geometry proved to be quite recon- 
cilable with admiring reference to Kepler's laws, and 
with obsequious and affectionate recurrence to the great 
principles enunciated by Newton. He was for spirit, 
every fibre of him: yet even in spirit he relished the ex- 
actness of clockwork. He admired that inflexible order 
which broke neither its rule nor its silence, and would 
have us build altars to what he thrice designates as the 
"Beautiful Necessity." 2 

He went even further than science; he attributed to 
nature a precision which the facts fail to justify. His 
theory of life abounds in hypothetical and dubious equa- 
tions. He affirmed the following propositions : — 

First, the equipoise between pleasure and pain, and 
its consequence, the equality of destinies. 

Second, the equivalence between merit and reward, 
and likewise between guilt and punishment. These laws 
(first and second) he chose to designate by the sugges- 
tively mechanical name of "compensation." ^ 

Third, the equivalence between desert and reputa- 

1 "Address," i, 129. « "Fate," vi, 48-49. 

' "Compensations," n, 93-127. 



324 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

tion, expounded in "Spiritual Laws." ^ "A man passes 
for what he is worth." ^ « ^g much goodness as there is, 
so much reverence it commands." ^ 

Fourth, the equivalence between character and in- 
fluence, expounded in "Character," * "All things work 
exactly according to their quality and according to their 
quantity." ^ 

He even loves the word "mathematical" in these as- 
sociations. "The eternal laws of mind . . . adjust the 
relation of all persons to each other by the mathematical 
relation of their havings and beings." ^ "The effect of 
any writing on the public mind is mathematically meas- 
urable by its depth of thought." "^ 

To the above list may be added other examples, less 
clear-cut or less diligently emphasized: — 

The equivalence of all states of society to each other, 
taught in " SeK-Rehance." ^ 

The equality of men's knowledge, taught in "Intellect" 
("Everybody knows as much as the savant ");9 and in 
"Representative Men " ("All men are at last of a size ") . ^^ 

The equivalence between wealth and economic abihty 
and virtue taught in "Wealth." ^^ 

The equivalence between being and experience, taught 
in "Spiritual Laws" ("He may see what he maketh")^^ 
and in " Fate " (" Events expand with the character ") M 

1 "Spiritual Laws," ii, 153-160. » "Spiritual Laws," n, 157. 

8 "Spiritual Laws," ii, 158. "* "Character," iii, 89-115. 

B "Character," iii, 101. 6 "Spiritual Laws," ii, 149. 

^ "Spiritual Laws," ii, 153. « " Self-Reliance," ii, 84-87. 

» "Intellect," ii, 330. " "Uses of Great Men," iv, 31. 

" "Wealth," VI, lOO-Ol. « "Spiritual Laws." n, 148. 
" " Fate/' VI, 42. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 325 

This body of propositions is curious. They insist on 
a trininess and crispness in the results of law which even 
the most tenacious partisans of law have never asserted. 
They demand a universe which, in obeying orders, shall 
touch its cap, so to speak, like a dutiful subordinate. 
Curious, also, is the fact that hardly one of these asser- 
tions is either capable of proof, or agreeable to the intui- 
tion of mankind. An inexact mind is revealed in the 
very insistence on exactness. 

XIII. Mechanism 

The moral equivalence, cited above, arrests us for a 
moment. An idealist, seeing the universe to be a perfect 
physical mechanism, and seeing likewise that it has, 
after its fashion, a moral trend, is moved strongly to 
accept the inference that it is a perfect moral mechanism. 
The temptation proved irresistible to Emerson. 

To most men the universe enforces gravitation, while 
it recommends probity. It will not permit the breach of 
a material law for a tenth of a second by the fraction of 
a dust-flake, but it will allow millions of men for hun- 
dreds of years to violate the fundamental edicts of 
morality. It may protest in the form of pain and loss, 
but it does not inhibit. The institution of civic and na- 
tional police is a drastic commentary on the world's 
success in policing itself, and the setting-up of heaven 
and hell expresses with unsparing candor the opinion of 
mankind on the effectiveness of merely natural rewards 
and penalties. It is generally assumed that a man's 
morality cannot safely be trusted to the inductions he 
makes from personal observation and experience. Legal 



326 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

and social penalties, with an inherited and inculcated 
love of right, are thought to be the needful supplements 
to his own private digest of the nature of things. The 
weight almost universally accorded to judicial, educa- 
tional, and religious safeguards is the measure of the 
popular sense that the justice done by unaided nature is 
obscure, tardy, and irregular. 

Emerson holds, on the contrary, that the universe, 
even on its lower plane, the plane of illusion as he would 
call it, is a masterly moral engine, showing exactness, 
delicacy, an approach almost to finish, in its operations. 
"A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life.'* ^ 
He compares it even to a multipHcation-table or a 
mathematical equation. ^ "Its exact value, nor more 
nor less, still returns." ^ The incentive to right is some- 
what weakened by Emerson's previous assertion in the 
same essay, that pleasure as such is likewise penal; that 
equality subsists not merely between guilt and penalty, 
but between pleasure and pain; that innocence, if it 
presumes to be happy, is to be mulcted no less inexor- 
ably than guilt. The dogma is becoming rather involved 
for a thinker like Emerson who is not in the least partial 
to complications, but another coil yet is to be added to 
its intricacies. The merely pleasurable compensation 
does not hold in the real world, the sphere of reason; 
there are no drawbacks to pure wisdom, no tolls on 
absolute virtue. "The soul is," and its fastness is 
inviolable.^ 

We face these propositions with astonishment. Is this 

* "Compensation," ii, 102. 2 "Compensation," 11, 102. 

3 "Compensation," 11, 102. * "Compensation," n, 120-21. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 327 

workmanlike, this shipshape, this water-tight cosmos 
really the lounging, slovenly, ungirt universe to which 
our sorrier fortune or weaker insight has accustomed 
us? The assertion is hard to beheve. "Compensation" 
is, nevertheless, a noble essay, in spite of its vain attri- 
bution of an imaginary precision to the moral teaching 
of the imiverse, because it brings out with unequaled 
vividness a true and weighty principle, the principle of 
reaction, reflux, the correction of extremes. 

XIV. Flux 

Emerson saw precision in the universe (not the same 
thing by any means as seeing the universe precisely) and 
a hasty reader might conclude that the cosmos was rigid 
in his eyes. In point of fact, his cosmos was superla- 
tively flexible. The word "flexible," indeed, is too weak. 
For "flexible" write "plastic," and for "plastic" write 
"fluid," and we shall approximate the interesting truth. 
Emerson's world was in flux, as a few specifications will 
show us. 

"There are no fixtures in nature," he cries. "The 
universe is fluid and volatile." ^ The dullard sees that 
water, that air, is fluid. Emerson sees the same 
property in granite, as he suggests in "Circles" ^ and in 
"Fate." "Every solid in the universe is ready to be- 
come fluid." ^ 

The dull man discerns the flux of life in the passage of 
the generations. Emerson saw the flux of species, when 
that thought was still the property of the wise few, 

1 "Circles," ii, 302. 2 "Circles," n, 302-03. 

3 "Fate," VI, 43. 



328 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

and told how the worm striving to be man, mounted 
"through all the spires of form." ^ 

The common man sees the state, institutions, churches, 
usages, property, "Rooted like oak-trees to the centre." ^ 
Emerson felt that "society is fluid." There probably 
never lived another man on whom the existing frame 
of society made an impression so vaporous and transi- 
tory. 

In certain moods persons also yield to the solvent: 
they "melt" into each other; they are seen as "a fleet of 
ripples which the wind drives over the surface of the 
water." ^ 

If we enter the mind itself, we encounter a like fluid- 
ity. Our interests, our affections even, are swept away 
in the flux. " We need change of objects." ^ Our powers 
are fluctuant. " I am God in nature : I am a weed by the 
wall." 5 Even our convictions, firmly as we may voice 
them, are not sure. "I am always insincere, as always 
knowing there are other moods." ^ The most settled 
determinations of men were pliable, in his view, before 
the magic of personal ascendency.^ Even the genius 
who made the stubborn world plastic held this power by 
virtue of a new plasticity, the equal fitness to all occa- 
sions, the seK-adjustment to the untried situation.^ 

If the advance of thought is in question, the lan- 
guage rises to sublimity. "The very hopes of man, the 
thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the man- 
ners and morals of mankind are all at the mercy of a 

1 "Poems," IX, 281. ^ "Politics," iii, 199. 

' "Nominalist and Realist," iii, 236. * "Experience," iii, 55. 

B "Circles," ii. 307. ^ "Nominalist and Realist," ii, 247. 

^ "Eloquence," vii, 80-81. ^ "Eloquence," vii, 76-77. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY S29 

new generalization.'* ^ The inclusion of the word "mor- 
als" in the above sentence makes the world reel: the 
virtues themselves have joined the flux. 

The divine power is likewise in flux. The one concrete 
thing, the one imagey that attaches to the Over-Soul 
in Emerson's description, is fluidity. By actual count, 
water furnishes the writer with not less than a dozen 
comparisons in that essay. The Over-Soul is forever 
novel, forever different from itself. "Lo! suddenly the 
great soul has enshrined itself in some other form and 
done some other deed, and that is now the flower and 
head of all living nature." ^ 

The flux is part of Emerson's own mental operations. 
Most men need, for instance, a fixed image of God — a 
fixed concreteness for the unthinking, a fixed abstrac- 
tion for the wise. For this Emerson would seem to have 
substituted a rotation of concrete images, the rotation in 
a sense suggesting and replacing the abstraction. He 
had a marvellous knack of keeping his footing upon 
mobile surfaces, as sailors walk steadily on a heaving 
deck. Most men, to insure their intellectual equilibrium, 
assign a quite factitious solidity and fixity to the uni- 
verse; Emerson balanced its agility by his own. The 
result was that he had access to an order of truth of 
which the majority of his brethren were organically 
incapable. Those who wish to measure aright his ad- 
dress and security in the handling of a peculiarly slip- 
pery and tantalizing thought are referred to his lecture 
on "The Method of Nature." ^ 

1 "Circles," ii, 308-09. 2 "Spiritual Laws," li. 166. 

8 "Method of Nature." i, 191-224. 



330 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

XV. Possibility 

What limits our expectation of change? Clearly our 
belief in fixity. Let the world become wax to our hands 
or to our imaginations, and possibiHties that yesterday 
were dim and remote become all at once vivid and near. 
The believer in flux becomes therefore the unsurpassed 
seer of possibilities. 

Emerson foresaw, in the material world, the extrac- 
tion from all substances of the same utility men now 
derive from iron, wood, and coal.* He foresaw, in poetic 
fashion, the evolutionary theory of the origin of species. 
His previsions in education were judged by Mr. Cabot 
to be remarkable. 2 He could prefigure, with Alcott's 
encouragement, the abolishing of government, the 
arrival of a day when "thousands of human beings 
might exercise towards each other the grandest and sim- 
plest sentiments as well as a knot of friends, or a pair 
of lovers."^ He pictured the time when the railroad, 
the insurance office, the joint-stock company, should be 
raised to a divine use, when mechanics should be guided 
by love.^ He dreamed of spirit which should make 
broom and mop holy and venerable.^ The abandonment 
by the mass of mankind of such ends as money, power, 
and fame, impressed him as one of the most credible and 
natural of possibilities. 

He foresaw poets to whom Homer and Milton should 
be "tin pans." ^ He exposed the fallacy of eclecticism 

1 "Uses of Great Men," iv, 9. « Cabot, ii, 614. 

» "Politics," III, 221. « "Arts," ii, 368-69. 

5 "Spiritual Laws," ii, 165-66. 
^ "Poetry and Imagination," viii, 68. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY S31 

which claimed that philosophy, becoming inclusive, 
might so become permanent.^ In " Circles" he pictures 
the final truth as indefinitely recessive, as lastingly in- 
accessible, and saw its temporary housings vanish after 
each other and into each other. ^ He saw new virtues 
superseding and surpassing the old.^ 

The faith of Emerson included even himself, even the 
present moment. The reported outbreak of poetry in 
one of his mates at college threw him into deKcious 
palpitations.* His hope of a roadside Messiah made him 
divinely patient with those wayworn saviors of the uni- 
verse, his "poor" as he affectionately called them, to 
whom his sympathy was alms.^ He entered into inti- 
mate conversation with the feeHngs that might have 
stirred a new participant in hieratic or Eleusinian mys- 
teries. In every orator he surmised a Pentecost. 

This rare power to make high possibiKties clear and 
near rested on two perfectly definable propositions: 
First, the absolute dependence of all things on the state 
of the human spirit; second, the power of that spirit to 
make instant, unHmited, and what he called total ad- 
vances.^ To this air wonders are native. But the word 
checks us in mid-course: a moment ago we dwelt on the 
changelessness of law, and our words now border the 
dialect of miracle. 

XVI. Magic 

Emerson, indeed, is the avowed patron of what he 
fearlessly, perhaps a Uttle wilfully, calls magic. "A deep 

1 "Literary Ethics," i, 171-73. « "Circles," ii, 301-22. 

8 "Circles," ii, 316-17. < "The Poet," iii, 10-11. 

6 E. in C. 201. 6 "The Over-Soul," ii, 274-75. 



S32 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

man," he says in "Beauty," believes in miracles, waits 
for them, believes in magic, believes that the orator 
will decompose his adversary: believes that the evil 
eye can wither, that the heart's blessing can heal.^ In 
"Character" he says: "He is a dull observer whose 
experience has not taught him the reahty and force of 
magic, as well as of chemistry. "^ Jg this mere rhetoric? 
Apparently Emerson actually believed in predestined 
meetings,^ in secret communications of virtue, in be- 
reavements ^ and in discoveries that are providentially 
timed, ^ in cannon-balls that spare workers but kill 
lookers-on,^ in the sure arrival of the fit sound to the apt 
ear,^ in the hiding from our eyes all that does not con- 
cern us.^ When he closed "Terminus" with 
"And every wave is charmed," 

he was not merely seeking witchery of phrase, but had 
honestly in mind a witchery not remote from the his- 
torical import of the word. His behef in the providen- 
tial adaptation of the circumstance to the individual 
need would have gratified his Puritan ancestors. He 
hated spirituaHsm, the "rat-and-mouse revelation," ^ as 
he bitingly called it, not because it countenanced mar- 
vel, but because it discouraged spirituality. 

Had Emerson, then, relinquished law in accepting 
magic? Rather say that for Emerson law was magic. 
For him wonders that struck his fellow-men as sheer 
anomalies were readily set down in the large account of 

1 "Beauty," vi, 283. * "Character," m, 110. 

3 "Character," m, 112. * Jour, iv, 125. 

^ Jour, vm, 7. ^ "Worship," vi, 233. 

' "The Over-Soul," n, 293-94. 

8 "Nominalist and Realist," ra, 243. » "Worship," vi, 209. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 333 

unascertained or unverified law. The imagination of 
Emerson saw a depth in law quite invisible to the nor- 
mal man, who believes that in circumscribing the uni- 
verse by an inflexible order he has thereby fixed it in the 
petty hoop of his own makeshift statements of his own 
meagre knowledge. Emerson's attitude, of course, is 
open to criticism. There is evident danger in the facile 
acceptance of beliefs agreeable to our own tempers, in 
spite of their antagonism, if not to the order of things, 
at all events to the best current understanding of that 
order, and Emerson's masterly good sense is conspicu- 
ous in his failure to avail himself of the charter to folly 
implicit in that dubious procediure. The curious point is 
the reinstatement of the content or substance of extinct 
superstitions under a quasi-scientific authorization. 

XVII. Magnifiers 

Returning to our starting-point in the particular 
experience, let us put to ourselves this question: if om- 
nipotence wished to aggrandize this experience to the 
highest conceivable point, what measures would it take? 
Plainly, the experience involves two elements, the per- 
ceived object and the perceiver. Let us, then, suppose 
that each of these factors undergoes an infinite exalta- 
tion; let us suppose that the perceived object expands 
to the dimensions of the cosmos, while the man, the per- 
ceiver, dilates to the stature of God. This supposition 
thus formulated appears Uke the foam of delirium, the 
riot of insanity. It is, nevertheless, not far from an 
accurate description of Emerson's conception of the 
actual fact. 



I 



S34 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

A glance cannot embrace the universe, but if the uni- ( 
verse repeated itself in every particle, a glance might 
embrace this epitome. By this simple expedient which 
appears in Emerson under the deceptively humble title; 
of the "Doctrine of the Leasts," room is found for the 
cosmos within the individual perception. Malpighi is 
quoted: "Nature exists entire in leasts"; and Sweden- 
borg: "The least forms . . . involve an idea represen- 
tative of their entire universe." ^ Emerson's version in 
"The Sphinx" is more poetical: — 

"Thorough a thousand voices 

Spoke the universal dame; 
* Who telleth one of my meanings 

Is master of all I am.' " ^ 

So, likewise, man the perceiver is associated with 
God. Many thinkers, conceiving Deity as the whole, 
have conceived men, the parts, to be sharers in Deity. 
The peculiarity of Emerson lies in the amazing intrepid- 
ity with which the attributes, the greatness, the dignity, 
of the whole are transferred to the part. The divine 
Law "solicits the pure in heart to draw on all its omnip- 
otence"^ (the italics are ours). "I am God in nature; 
I am a weed by the wall." * "If a man is at heart just, 
then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortal- 
ity of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man 
with justice." ^ We may postpone the criticism of these 
propositions : our aim now is to appreciate their compass. 

Adding these two doctrines together, a perception ap- 
pears to us in an altogether novel light; it is the inos- 

* "Swedenborg," rv, 114. ' Poems, ix, 25. 

3 "Fate," VI, 49. < "Ckcles," ii, 307. 

5 "Address," i, 122. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY SS5 

culation of two infinities. Comment is hardly needed. 
In geometry there is a curve called the hyperbola, which 
consists of the junction or rather the close approxima- 
tion of two curves both of which reach back into adverse 
infinities. That curve might symbolize the Emersonian 
perception. 

XVIII. Rhetoric 

There are times when Emerson propounds as solid 
reality matter which seems hardly more than vivid 
rhetoric even to sympathetic readers. The two proposi- 
tions in the foregoing section, particularly the second, 
may be cited as examples of this disparity. 

It is pleasant to be told of " a world in a grain of sand " 
to use Blake's phrase, but nobody furnishes the specifi- 
cations; nobody shows us in the sand-grain the tropics 
and the poles, Asia and the Spice Islands, Sahara and 
the Pyramids, the Russian steppes and the Champagne 
vineyards, the ruins of Baalbec and the Thames Tunnel. 
Even Emerson never is at the pains to show us that a 
star, a crystal, or a scale is encyclopaedic. When we com- 
pare the project of discovering the universe in a single 
particular with the boundless sweep and startling vari- 
ety of Emerson's own illustration, we are reminded of 
Macaulay's philosopher who declaimed "in praise of 
poverty with two millions sterling out at usury." ^ 

The assertions of man's identity with God impress the 
reader as rhetorical in a sense in which that term is not 
fairly applicable to many of Emerson's daring tropes. 
We can translate a metaphor, "I tell you that babe is a 

* Macaulay, Worlcs, Riverside ed., ii, 438. 




S36 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

thousand years old" ^ into its literal counterpart, "The 
influences of a thousand years act on that babe through 
his ancestors " ; and it loses vividness, not weight. The 
expression, "Every man is an inlet into the deeps of 
Reason," ^ is convertible into: "Man is of one substance 
with Reason, and communication is unimpeded"; and 
it is seen at once that the trope merely gives the thought 
the same value for the imagination which it originally 
possessed for the intellect. The difficulty of finding Kt- 
eral equivalents for phrases like "I am God in nature," 
or "If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God," 
in which substance shall not sink in the same ratio with 
vivacity is the measure of their debt to exaggeration. 
When we identify the partial and local manifestation, 
man, with the absolute and universal essence, God, do 
we not say in effect that man is somewhat absolute and 
rather universal? We cannot have degrees in notions 
whose differentia is the exclusion of degree. 

Another form of expression, equally dear to Emerson 
and equally unconvincing to his readers, is illustrated in 
the familiar stanza : — 

*'I am owner of the sphere, 
Of the seven stars and the solar year. 
Of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain. 
Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakspeare's strain." • 

The reader should be grateful for bounties in which 
he participates, but he hardly warms to the thought of 
privileges which he shares with the Patagonian and the 
Dyak. All mankind, of course, are Shakespearian by the 
same patent as Emerson and himself. Does this resolve 
itseff into anything other or better than the old battered, 

1 "Old Age," VII, 317. 2 "Address," i, 125. » Poems, ix, 282. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY S37 

not too heartening fact that he is zoologically allied to 
the author of "King Lear" and "As You Like It"? Is 
the matter cleared up by the intervention of a joint- 
stock company called the "universal mind" in which he 
and Shakespeare are both stockholders, but in which 
the advantage in dividends is so unmistakably on the 
side of Shakespeare? Granting that his mere status as 
man is, so to speak, an order on nature for a Hamlet or 
Macbeth, if in experience only one such order out of a 
billion is ever honored by nature, must not that circum- 
stance depress the value of the currency? A certain 
smallness, we fully admit, attaches to the pursuit of 
Emerson in this fashion, because it is at once so easy 
and so futile: Emerson is as yielding, and, at the same 
time, as unyielding, as air or water. Nevertheless, it is 
well for once to bring out the fact that even sympathetic 
readers can sometimes find only rhetoric in thoughts 
that gave him genuine, vivid, and perennial satisfaction. 
In another aspect, however, the case is different. 
This dilation of the object seen and likewise of the per- 
ceiver (with the related participation of each man in all 
men's powers) may be viewed as the forms, wise or un- 
wise, assumed by Emerson's glorification of the unit 
of consciousness, the solitary experience. Seen in this 
light, it is doubtful if we have any right to call them 
either fallacies or hyperboles. 

XIX. OVEK-SOUL 

It is time to collect and to fill out the hints already 
noted of that divine force to the worship of which 
Emerson's life was devoted. 



338 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

In the names assigned to this power, he was unlucky. 
In the search for achromatic terms, he chose words that 
were meagre or ansemic. He rather avoids the word 
"God" with its teeming polarities: he uses "the soul," 
which is feeble and, so to speak, unbaked; "the Over- 
Soul," which externaHzes immanence; sometimes he says 
"Law" or "Necessity" or "Being," which are arid; 
sometimes "moral sentiment," in which the dryness of 
the adjective offsets the moisture in the noun, with a 
general effect of pale neutrality. The pronoun is char- 
acteristically " it " — a rebound perhaps from the " Him " 
and "He" of orthodox typography. 

The idea is central in Emerson, but centres are prone 
to be invisible, and the concept, when stripped of meta- 
phor, is curiously featureless. From "The Over-Soul," 
which professes to be explanatory, we get one sentence 
which, for pure enlightenment, outranks all the rest of 
the essay: "When it breathes through his [man's] intel- 
lect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is 
virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love." ^ 
For the rest, the impression we get is vast and fluid — 
oceanic, in short; with men as arms or inlets of the sea. 
It will be noticed that even, in this brief summary, we 
slide into metaphor; so indigent is the abstract idea. 

Let us here recall that for the fixed concrete image of 
the idolater and the fixed abstract image of the meta- 
physician, Emerson substituted a rotation of concrete 
images. It seems probable that while the unity that 
underlay and cemented the manifestations was the ob- 
ject of his day-long and life-long worship, that unity in 
1 "The Over-Soul." ii. 271. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY S39 

its abstract form, in its severance from manifestation, 
he scarcely cared to see. For Emerson, it will be remem- 
bered, every experience was a manifestation: the ab- 
sence of a fixed idea, therefore, did not act as a break 
on the continuity of worship. 

The incomparable plenitude of forms, the incompar- 
able capacity for seizing the abstraction through the 
form, the incapacity of seizing it without the form, — 
these traits individualize Emerson. 

The greatness of Plato he thought to consist in the 
combination in that man's brain of "the unity of Asia 
and the detail of Europe," ^ the One and the Many, the 
East loving infinity and the West delighting in bounda- 
ries. ^ Take this same Asia and reconcile it again with 
Europe, not Plato's Europe, but Europe moved ninety- 
five degrees deeper into the Occident and twenty-two 
hundred years further into the depth of time, and you 
reach Emerson. Assuming Emerson's view of Plato to 
be correct (its exactness has been questioned), we may 
vary our statement by affirming that the interest in all 
things as subsidiary to the interest in the one thing is 
the distinguishing feature of both minds. 

In the light of the solidarity or continuity of man and 
God, the doctrines of flux and of magic acquire fresh 
clearness and novel meaning. Nature and society are 
absolutely and instantly dominated by the changes in 
man's mind; but man's mind can draw on the whole 
power of God. Through the human spirit, therefore, the 
full might of divinity can be brought to bear almost 
instantly upon the forms of matter and society. Hence 
1 "Plato." IV. 53. 2 "Plato." iv, 52. 



840 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



4 



that sense of the continuous nearness of vast possibili- 
ties which ahnost gave back to Emerson the faith in 
miracle. 

The divine power is universally active, but its char- 
acteristic is a perpetual novelty. It refuses the tried 
path, the old form. An infinite variety which age cannot 
wither nor custom stale is its elusive and captivating 
prerogative. At this point the doctrine of self-reliance, 
viewed by us formerly in its pedestrian or instrumental 
aspect, assumes at a stroke new interest and dignity. 
If difference be the mark and the measure of the pres- 
ence of divinity, self-reliance, which is the expression of 
that difference, is the removal of the barrier to the influx 
of God into the heart. Self-reliance is no longer a mere 
empirical discovery: it stands out in beautiful fitness 
and certainty as an integral necessity in the Emersonian 
scheme, and only the opponents of that scheme retain 
the right to question its validity. Dr. Emerson is happy 
in the suggestion that "The Over-Soul" is the natural 
corrective to "SeK-ReHance." ^ The word "self" is the 
unfortunate choice of a man who is anxious to avoid 
reKgious language in the enunciation of a religious truth. 
For Emerson the "self," in the conventional sense, 
hardly exists : there is the other man in the largest sense 
(society, institutions, custom), and there is God; a man 
obeys one or the other, and the substitution of the sec- 
ond dependence for the first is what is known by the 
misleading and paradoxical name of "self-reliance." 

At this point, a solid advantage is gained in the per- 
fect reconcilement of two favorite theses of Emerson 
» Works, II, 390. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 341 

which a surface view declares to be contradictory: the 
thesis that all good lies in self-trust, independence, defi- 
ance of the world, and the thesis that all good lies in 
self-surrender, abandonment, the subjugation of the 
individual by the universal. Hence the supposed arro- 
gance and the real humility. 

XX. Identity 

What will happen when these three factors unite: 
first, an extraordinarily wide and various aggregate of 
perceptions and thoughts; second, a profound sense of 
the oneness of all things; third, a passionate and eager 
delight in the detection of resemblance .f* There will 
result a religion which shall be also an occupation and 
an entertainment, and a philosophy in which identity 
shall be exalted. No man ever breathed, possibly, who 
found more pleasure than Emerson in the disclosure of 
hidden likeness, and this, because no man living was 
ever more sensitive to the pungency of surface difference. 
We can do no justice to identity by remembering it all 
the time: we can appreciate its force only by alternately 
forgetting and recalling it. It was the vividness of the 
cognition in Emerson, the interest in countless particu- 
lars for their own sake, that gave dramatic incisiveness 
and unrivalled force to the ensuing recognition. To the 
apostle of the single experience, process was far more 
stirring than result, and, in the leap from one thought to 
its cognate, he attained perhaps his deepest realization 
of the unfathomed significance of nature. His progress 
seemed to follow, not the radius y but the chord; in plainer 
language, he did not so much reach the centre by actual 



842 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

passage from the circumference as he felt or assumed it 
in his movements from one point in the circumference 
to another. The tracking of a fact or idea through its 
multiplying disguises became the keenest of intellectual 
pleasures: it combined the solemnity of worship with 
the zest of sport. 

XXL Parallelism 

Of these likenesses, one is preeminent. It has been 
tersely and beautifully put in his first work: "The whole 
of nature is a metaphor of the human mind." ^ Or, again, 
in homelier phrase in the lecture on Montaigne: "Every 
fact is related on one side to sensation, and on the other 
to morals. . . . Life is a pitching of this penny, — 
heads or tails." ^ The interest of this thought for Emer- 
son is inexhaustible. He makes language, that is, the 
furnishing of types or symbols, one of the prime ends of 
nature.^ He sometimes defines the poet as nothing more 
than the interpreter of this coincidence.* Man is inter- 
esting because of his citizenship in both worlds. 

Emerson's sanity showed itself in the avoidance of the 
customary indiscretion of the holders of this faith, — 
the attempt to compile a lexicon of the material world 
in terms of the spiritual. An English-French dictionary 
is a feasible undertaking, because the French equiva- 
lents of an English word are limited, few, and definable. 
A lexicon of matter in terms of spirit such as Sweden- 
borg and (presumably) Schelling favored, is chimerical 
because the meanings of any one natural fact are num- 

1 "Nature," i, 32. « "Montaigne," iv, 149. 

8 "Nature/' i, 25-35. « "The Poet," iii, 13-21. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY S43 



berless and unascertainable. As Emerson pithily says: 
" In the transmission of the heavenly waters, every hose 
fits every hydrant." ^ We have again the rejection of 
finalities, the disclaiming of the accepted theory that a 
mind is to accumulate and to find limits in its accumu- 
lations as a river makes deposits into banks. The single- 
ness, the totality, of the direct experience is primary. 
You shall have your full liberty now and here, but you 
shall not bind to-morrow, you who so gayly shook off 
the fetters of yesterday. Hence while the general relation 
between matter and spirit is absolute, the 'particular con- 
nections are more or less occasional ; and the harvest is 
not science but poetry. 

XXII. Idealism 

Was Emerson an idealist? A distinction is imperative. 
In the sense of a disbeliever in the actuality of matter, 
Emerson was no convinced or committed idealist. In 
the sense of one who maintains the absolute dependence 
of sense-impressions on character and intelligence, he was 
j perhaps the most sweeping, the most fearless, the most 
i insistent idealist that ever lived. He liked matter, and 
i its conversion into pure spirit would perhaps have af- 
I fected him as unpleasantly as the proposal to convert a 
i tried and faithful dog into a human being. He says him- 
self: "It is a small and mean thing to attempt to dis- 
i prove the being of matter. I have no hostility to oxygen 
or hydrogen, to the sun, or the hyacinth that opened 
this morning its little censer in his beam." ^ This leaves 
an opening for matter, at least in the form of hyacinths. 
1 "Swedenborg." iv, 121. 2 Jour, iv, 32. 



344 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



n 



In some other ways, nevertheless, the position of Emer- 
son is ultra-idealistic. The strict idealist must admit 
that the mountain on the horizon is a mental image, but I 
he is quite free to believe, if he so chooses, that the image 
is the same for the blockhead and the philosopher, for 
the bandit and the saint. Emerson vests the control of 
this image in character, in intelligence, and he is tireless 
in descanting on the fulness and precision of this author- 
ity. To abolish matter is needless; its enslavement will 
suflSce. In the chapter on "Idealism" in "Nature," po- I 
etry, philosophy, metaphysics, religion, even the eyes 
themselves of which a sterner probity might have been 
expected, are shown to be all alike in their inclination 
to take liberties with matter. ^ So in other fields. In the 
questions of influence versus character, of reputation 
versus merit, the ascendant is with the inner or subjec- 
tive factor. Still more impressive is the assertion that 
the whole environment of life — even the events of life 
— are an efflux of consciousness. "Each creature puts 
forth from itself its own condition and sphere." ^ "The 
event fits you like your skin." ^ So, in society, the insti- 
tutions and customs, which seem embedded in nature, 
are the consequence and the copy of a state of mind. 

XXIII. Society 

On the word "society" we pause. Given a corrupt 
social order; given, in a thoughtful spectator of that 
order, a superhuman moral code, a dauntless courage, 
a view of the flux of institutions, a belief in high and 
rapid possibilities: and a great reformer seems inevit- 

1 "Nature," i, 47-60. « "Fate," vi, 41. » "Fate," vi, 40. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 345 

able. That Emerson failed to be quite that or just that 
is a fact that calls for brief elucidation. 

Emerson's sense of social evil was keen and multifa- 
rious; its multifariousness decreased its intensity. A 
humane man, hearing one cry of agony, rushes eagerly 
to the aid of the sufferer; hearing twelve cries at the 
same time, he is constrained by humanity itself to 
pause, to consider, to postpone, to put on a temporary 
stoicism. Emerson saw wrong in slavery, but he saw 
wrong in property, wrong in trade, wrong in drunken- 
ness, wrong in household service. His perception of 
identity revealed the same evil in a series or terrace of 
forms. You rebuke slavery, but to be idle and to leave 
hard work to menials is slave-holding in substance or in 
nascence.^ You refuse to buy molasses made by slaves, 
but the gold-piece you accept was the price of that 
molasses.2 (The reader will note with the proper sur- 
prise that these points are not only arguments, but argu- 
ments based on consistency,) For Emerson the totality 
of the evil demonstrated and derided the partiality of 
the reform. 

When the rogue pays his grocer as a pledge of reforma- 
tion, we test his sincerity by asking whether he has paid 
his tailor and his butcher likewise. Abolition is one debt 
to the ideal. If your motives are pure, that purity will 
appear in an equal zeal for the discharge of other obli- 
gations. But abolition, as Emerson sees it, narrows its 
defenders: they are fortunate if they escape unembit- 
tered from its influence. 

Institutions are the shadows of thought, and the 
1 Cabot, II, 424-25. 2 jour. vi, 360. 



346 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

property of a shadow is to respond instantly to the 
slightest change in the generating object but to be imper- 
vious to any form of action brought to bear upon itself. 
The thing that counts is the thought of persons — not 
exactly that vulgar amalgam known as public opinion 
which is formed by the running together and coalescence 
of the gluey elements in human nature — but rather the 
sum of countless intimate and insular experiences on the 
part of solitary individuals. If an institution, slavery for 
example, rests on a state of mind in slave and in owner, 
that state of mind remaining unchanged, it has roots in 
the order of the universe and is inexpugnable. Hence 
came that aloofness and impassivity which for many 
years qualified and partly paralyzed his sincere disappro- 
bation of slavery. The same principle explains his later 
incandescence. Slavery might be fit for Carolina, but 
its unfitness for Massachusetts was evident, and the 
imposition by force of a low order of conduct upon a 
relatively high phase of consciousness made the Anti- 
Slavery Law of 1850 the object of Emerson's most 
scorching anathemas. To make men better by statute 
may be hopeless; to make them worse by statute is 
imbecile and infamous at once. 

Emerson believed that reform should start from the 
centre; but that centre was not Washington. The capi- 
tal of the United States had its site in the heart of the 
individual. Changes from that quarter only could be 
valid and lasting, and he was authorized by his "magic" 
to believe that changes so originated would diffuse their 
effects, without means and without delay, to the out- 
skirts of the environing community. The avenue to 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 347 

public reform is self-culture, and in the preference of 
that route, Emerson's constitution seconded his philos- 
ophy. His power to adopt the more orthodox method at 
the command of duty has been amply demonstrated in 
the preceding narrative. 

XXIV. Government 

One point must be briefly restated at this juncture, 
because it marks the crest of Emerson's individualism. 
He believed that when an issue arose between govern- 
ment and the individual conscience, the conscience was 
paramount. But he went farther than this: he believed 
that the enforcement by government of a course ap- 
proved by the individual was an affront to the dignity of 
the private conscience. He was, in brief, a peaceful and 
moral anarchist, and government was to him what the 
birch is in our day to humane parents or the rod to ad- 
vanced educators, a discredited and obsolescent make- 
shift. One sentence will suggest the tenor of his teach- 
ing: "I do not call to mind a single human being who 
has steadily denied the authority of the laws, on the 
simple ground of his own moral nature." ^ 

XXV. Evil 

The proposition to abolish the police is outrageous to 
the average man. It is bound up, however, with the 
world's prime quarrel with Emerson — his unconcern in 
the face of evil. 

Evil is divisible into pain and wrong, and Emerson's 
offence varies in the two divisions. He underrates the 
1 "Politics," m, 221. 



S48 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

amount of pain, it is said, and he underrates the impor- 
tance of wrong. In view of the scope and sharpness of his 
strictures on mankind, it is doubtful whether he meas- 
ured too leniently the deviation of actuality from stand- 
ard in the field of ethics. It would be more exact to say 
that he overrated the preponderance of good. 

Let us now try to understand the Emersonian under- 
valuing of pain. Three classes of men emphasize suffer- 
ing: first, the happy but imaginative and sympathetic 
person whose bugaboos are uncorrected by experience; 
second, the cowardly sufferer who magnifies the suffering 
to excuse the cowardice; third, the brave sufferer who 
magnifies the pain to augment the bravery. But if a 
man had been taught in childhood to bear and to despise 
pain, to face poverty (with the imminence at least of 
hunger and cold), with the scornful negligence of a mind 
forearmed because preoccupied, he might come to think 
so lightly of suffering that gayety would become for him 
the badge of heroism. Give him a doctrine of compen- 
sation which shall equate pleasure and pain, a doctrine 
of illusion which shall relegate bodily suffering to the 
sphere of the unreal, and his growth in unconcern be- 
comes intelligible. We have in Emerson the forestal- 
ment of pain by stronger interests : he shared the indif- 
ference of the lover who has wounded himself on the 
spikes of the wall which he has overleaped to find his 
mistress. 

What examples of suffering would press such an esti- 
mate hardest? The fagot, perhaps, and the slave-ship. 
It is curious that Emerson has passed his theory through 
the ordeal of these stringent examples, and that it 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 849 

emerges, by his own showing, unscathed from the test. 
The torments of the martyrs, he observes tranquilly, are 
"illusory." ^ Throughout life his sympathy for bodily 
pain, though not wanting, had strict limits, and he for- 
gave crime more readily than the recital of distempers. 

To pass to the second topic. To lighten pain is to re- 
duce guilt, since wrong is obnoxious largely as the cause 
of pain. Now the temper of our own day sympathizes 
with the diminution of the solemnity, of what might be 
called the inverted sanctity, of wrong. The best spirits, 
however, find something profane and libertine in the 
attenuation of the weight of evil-doing. 

It is worth remarking at the outset that the theory of 
benign omnipotence demands the abolition of evil. The 
most illogical of men, by the general consensus of his fel- 
lows, finds himself in the curious situation of defending 
a logical position against the almost unanimous protest 
of all other theists. 

Present-day thinkers would largely concur in the ab- 
stract dogma that evil is merely the absence of good, 
as cold is of heat. The incentive or positive element in 
honest and dishonest acquisition, in lawful and unlaw- 
ful sexuality, seems so clearly one and the same that one 
leans to the conclusion that the moral differentia in the 
two cases resides in the absence of a check. Fire or sex 
may destroy, but if fire plus care and intelligence, if sex 
1 plus justice and love, becomes wholly beneficial, a diffi- 
iculty which an addition, a contribution, can remove 
seems properly classed as negative. But it may be plau- 
sibly urged that the distinction has no force in practice. 
1 "Courage," VII, 1Q5. 



350 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

The discovery that cold is the absence of heat has not 
diminished the vogue of sables in the Russian winter, 
nor, according to the best latter-day advices, driven 
American fuel-dealers into bankruptcy. Does the theory 
that evil is the absence of good lessen the stringency of 
the moral conflict? 

The mere theory, let us instantly confess, is powerless, 
but the state of mind that begot it is another matter. To 
pursue our former figure, the exertions and precautions 
which would be wise at the Arctic Circle may be idiotic 
at the Tropic of Cancer. What Emerson represents is a 
difference of climate; his philosophy is the native of a 
warmer zone, where an exposure that would be rashness 
in higher latitudes is rational and discreet. On study, 
his depreciation of wrong, of guilt, becomes intelligible. 
On the one hand, it is the logical outcome of his philos- 
ophy, his faith in an all-powerful benevolence, his belief 
in the perfection of the cosmos as a moral mechanism, 
and his reliance on the instincts of the individual; on the 
other, it is the flower of a happy private experience in 
which the absence of low ends and strong passions had 
calmed the violence and abated the rigors of the moral 
conflict. The adoption of this view as a standard by men 
of other and harsher experience is no more to be urged 
by the discriminating than its dismissal as a dream or 
illusion is to be sanctioned by the wise. Nobody views 
the matter in the right light; nobody has done justice to 
this enlightening and enheartening possibility that a 
life, superlatively observant and far from wholly soli- 
tary or wholly inactive, should have been passed, with- 
out hurt to probity, under a greatly diminished sense 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 351 

of the calamitous and iniquitous sides of existence. Peo- 
ple think of Emerson's view as constitutional; as if our 
view, the view of the millions, were not likewise constitu- 
tional, and as if, constitution for constitution, the pref- 
erence belonged to us. 

XXVI. Moralists 

The high moralists may be ranged in two classes. 
There are men in whom the law, the sense of duty or 
obligation, the feeling of responsibility, is developed to a 
point which threatens the maintenance of a due empha- 
sis on love and the humane virtues. There are souls, on 
the contrary, in whom the supreme interest of love in 
the Christian sense leads to a subordination, perhaps 
an underestimate, of the claims of bare law on human 
observance. If we now ask ourselves to which of these 
two natural biases the first of American moralists yielded 
himself, the answer is a surprise: he laid no special, no 
distinguished, emphasis on either. 

XXVII. Duty 

Emerson faced in his career unpalatable obligations, 

every one of which, so far as we know, he punctiliously 

discharged; the difficulties they offered, however, do not 

seem to have tinged his view of life. He could write 

nobly on duty when he chose, and one of his best known 

and best loved quatrains closes with the exalting 

lines : — 

"When Duty whispers low. Thou must. 
The youth replies, I can." ^ 

1 Poems, IX, 207. 



S52 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Still, for a specialist in morals, Emerson's handlings of 
the theme are unquestionably few. The alertness of 
critics has even discovered that he wanted conscience,^ — 
a fact that had escaped the observation of his family, 
his townsfolk, his servants, and his creditors. He prac- 
tised virtue, indeed, with a quite inexcusable readiness. 
One might forgive the man his goodness, though even 
that was of an immoderate and unbridled kind, but his 
effrontery in doing right without contortions is not to be 
condoned. 

Conscience and duty measure and traverse the inter- 
val between desire and right, and as this interval gradu- 
ally narrows, the storage of energy for the leaping of the 
chasm will decline like other superfluities. One cannot 
expect the conscription bureau to retain its importance 
in the face of the increasing enlistment of volunteers, 
and it is futile to take fright at the reduction of the 
police force when the cause of the retrenchment is the 
decay of crime. True, many men are still helped by self- 
coercion, but Emerson never depreciated nor discour- 
aged the fulfilment of duty; he simply refused to add 
either the lustre or the onus of sacrifice to acts which 
wore for him the aspect of privilege. 

XXVIII. Love 

The treatment of duty is frugal. Is he copious, by the 
law of contraries, on the theme of love? Of love in the 
Christian sense, that sentiment which embraces all man- 
kind in a bond which takes its form and color from the 
fraternal and domestic rather than the strictly sexual 

^ "H. James, Sr.," in Brownell, American Prose Masters, 175. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 353 

emotions, Emerson speaks neither charily nor lavishly. 
The essay on *'Love," which is half sexual, half philo- 
sophic, may be said both to underlie and to overlie this 
sentiment, but hardly to include it in the strict sense. 
Beautiful passages, more directly to the point, can be 
culled from the essays with just that quantum of search 
which proves that they are not fully or markedly char- 
acteristic. There is one in "Compensation": ^ there is 
another in "Heroism." "The love that will be annihi- 
lated sooner than treacherous has already made death 
impossible, and affirms itself no mortal but a native of 
the deeps of absolute and inextinguishable being." ^ 

The light touch on love should be viewed in two rela- 
tions. It marks, in one view, the magnitude of love, a 
foregone, an axiomatic magnitude : the need of breathing 
and the need of food are touched with significant light- 
ness in treatises on physiology. In the next place, while 
in practice Emerson laid all the needful stress on the 
friendly offices of social life, his conception of love lacked 
domesticity, lacked neighborliness, in a remarkable de- 
gree. By a series of expansions and rarefactions, love 
passed from men to mankind, from mankind to human- 
ity, from humanity to divinity, until at last it became 
hardly distinguishable from his love of virtue, truth, and 
beauty. Plato counted the rungs of that celestial ladder 
in the "Phsedrus" and the "Symposium." For "disin- 
terested" or "benevolent" Emerson often used a singu- 
lar synonym, original perhaps with him, typical at all 
events of his wish to desiccate his vocabulary on a sub- 
ject which liquefies the diction of most men. The syno- 
1 "Compensation," ii, 123-24. ^ "Heroism," ii, 264. 



S54 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

nym is "public." His devotion was not checked by the 
impersonality of its object. Many men can die for their 
families, many for their country, a few for mankind; 
Emerson could have died for the universe. We may sum 
up the position by saying that the word "love" is a little 
too warm, too substantial, too personal to be his favorite 
term for the expression of this loyalty. 

XXIX. Virtues 

The noblest of moralists talks rarely of duty, not too 
frequently of love. Are we to understand, then, that he 
dilates on the particular virtues? The reply to this 
query is suggestive. 

Let it be borne in mind that Emerson found leisure 
to write two essays on art, two essays on manners (the 
second entitled "Behavior"), an essay on politics, an 
essay on wealth, an essay on farming, and an essay on 
the superlative. It is interesting to observe that a 
moralist so excursive has written no essay on justice, 
none on temperance, none on chastity, none on good tem- 
per, none on veracity (except the "Truth" in "Eng- 
lish Traits"), none on humility, none on faithfulness. 
The list of virtues actually handled is peculiar; there is 
one essay on heroism, another on courage, a third on a 
trait so subsidiary as prudence, a fourth and a fifth on 
the honorary or associate virtues of self-reliance and 
love. It cannot even be said that he is at all liberal even 
of paragraphs devoted to the elucidation or enforcement 
of other virtues. How shall we reconcile these facts with 
the prevailing impression of his devotion to ethics, with 
the identification of morality with God himself in pas- 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 355 

sages like the following: "Men talk of *mere morality' — 
which is much as if one should say, *Poor God, with 
nobody to help him? "* ^ 

He slights virtues because he worships morality, — 
that is a good part of the explanation. Virtues are to him 
an adaptation of the divine principle to special, imme- 
diate needs, a translation of the pure text into a rough 
vernacular for the benefit of the half -cultivated. A vir- 
tue is a line drawn from God to man: its junction with 
man is the point that affects men in general : Emerson is 
interested in its junction with God. In this meeting- 
place the virtues coalesce. We have already quoted the 
passage in which he refers to the " descent and accommo- 
dation felt when we leave speaking of moral nature to 
urge a virtue which it enjoins." ^ Since the virtues have 
one terminus in man, whose circumstances and require- 
ments are in flux, their forms, as we know them, are 
transitive and provisional.^ It is quite possible that the 
major virtues of to-day, justice, faithfulness, chastity, 
and benevolence, may come in time to hold the subor- 
dinate part now occupied by such merits as industry, 
caution, and thrift. The high qualities, justice, temper- 
ance, truth, are too abstract for most men : for Emerson 
they were too concrete. With his sure footing on slip- 
pery surfaces, he resolves virtue into a tendency, a 
direction, the final object of which is deity. 

Once more the commanding position of self-reliance 
in the moral life rises before us in new clearness. Self- 
reliance establishes that relation to God which is the sole 

1 "Worship," VI, 215. 2 «xhe Over-Soul," ii, 275. 

3 "Circles," II. 314-17. 



356 EALPH WALDO EMERSON 

ground of worth in particular virtues. The virtues are 
specific conformities to the will of an acknowledged 
sovereign ; self-reliance is the oath of fealty, so to speak, 
which makes us liegemen and vassals of that power. 

XXX. Insecurity 

A parenthesis may be inserted at this point. Without 
any weakening of practice or even of standard in its mere 
prescriptions for conduct, without any hurt to the benef- 
icence of a high example and a noble spirit, Emerson 
admitted into the metaphysics, into the philosophic 
basis, of morality certain tenets not without peril to the 
consciences of smaller men. No less than four of these 
disintegrative elements can be specified: — 

First, the admission that acts vary with motives to an 
extent that renders the basest act in certain junctures 
commendable.^ 

Second, the doctrine, already discussed, that evil is 
purely negative. ^ 

Third, the belief that the intellect knows no evil; ^ in 
other words, that a whole range of experience subsists 
where moral distinctions are inoperative. 

Fourth, an increasing sense of the virtus in the vis, of 
the rights of health and energy, of the righteousness in 
constitution. On this topic, barely touched hitherto, a 
word of explanation is required. 

Emerson's constitutional infirmity admired its oppo- 
site — instinctive force. He did not pity victims over- 
much; his indifference to pain fostered equanimity, and 

1 "Circles," ii, 316-17. 2 "Address," i, 124. 

3 "Experience," iii, 79. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 357 

lie left the bill to be paid by tbe indefatigable "Com- 
pensation." The universe could protect itself, and the 
spectacle of unhampered power was exhilarating. As the 
world was one, even the force that showed itself in ruth- 
lessness could be traced back to the author of compas- 
sion. The result was a singular leniency to the cruelties 
and injustices that accompanied power and impulse. 
The vigorous arraignment of Bonaparte at the close of 
the "Napoleon'* is less impressive than the essayist's 
capacity to forget his crimes in the delighted contempla- 
tion of his energy. In "Power," he speaks with admira- 
tion rather than lenity of "rough riders," of "legislators 
in shirt sleeves . . . half orator, half assassin," ^ of the 
"strong transgressor," of "Lynch law," of "soldiers and 
pirates," of "bruisers," ^ and pens a not unsympathetic 
character-sketch of a man who "united in his person the 
functions of bully, incendiary, swindler, barkeeper, and 
burglar." ^ 

To Emerson, be it remembered, immoral power and 
virtue are the respective stages, lower and higher, of a 
single cosmic movement. The strong good man was the 
lineal heir of the strong bad man; the weakling, good or 
bad, was a cringing bastard of the stock. Power was un- 
educated virtue: virtue was power plus sight. He saw 
in the Christopher who served the devil gallantly the 
future servant of the Son of Man. 

The four opinions noted above had no effect on the 
soundness of Emerson's private morals. He had his own 
defences. He joggled the row-boat recklessly because 

» "Power," VI, 63. 2 «« Power," vi, 64. 

8 "Power," VI, 67. 



358 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

he knew that he could swim. He forgot, perhaps, that 
he had fellow-passengers. 

XXXI. CONCLTTSION 

We return to the argument which our parenthesis 
suspended. Some pages back we affirmed that, from 
Emerson's point of view, action as a spur to thought was 
invaluable; action as the carriage of thought into matter 
or into the social organism is an affair of small conse- 
quence. What applies to action in general applies no 
less to the special province of ethical conduct. When 
virtue has achieved the mastery of the will, its task is 
substantially complete. Effects are indifferent — let us 
even say ineffectual. If the sacrifice, if the service, be 
genuinely willed, frustration is unimportant, or, in es- 
sence perhaps, impossible. "Has it not occurred to you 
that you have no right to go, unless you are equally 
willing to be prevented from going? " ^ Do you fear that 
society will fail of the needed renovation.? There is no 
society. Out there in the dim externality there are self- 
centred insular states of mind like your own, and your 
loyalty is their welfare. The phantasm you call society 
will reflect instantly in clear ameliorations any rise in 
the moral level of individuals. 

Life is subjective: life is internal. Receptiveness is the 
normal and happy state, and conduct is instrumental 
to reception. Conduct, indeed, coincides pretty closely 
both in substance and in sound with a French derivative 
of the self-same etymology, "conduit." It is a pipe dis- 
charging old material that new material may have li- 
1 "The Over-Soul," ii, 293. 



EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY 359 

cense to enter; when transmission stops, reception ceases. 
Is this life egotistic? The ego is a frontier dividing one 
tiny section of the universal life from the whole, and the 
mark of the state of mind we seek is the obliteration of 
that frontier. Is the life selfish? Solitary it may indeed 
be called, but its solitude rejoices in the discernment of 
the welfare of the whole. 

The relation of the doctrines expounded in the fore- 
going sections to the particular experience may be briefly 
pointed out. If the single experience is to be uniformly 
exalted, the universe must be cleared of evil; the grossest 
act or heaviest calamity must be viewed as the stammer- 
ing of the divine power in its first untrained efforts to 
articulate. Love, also, must be removed from individ- 
uals and concentrated on universal powers, if its riches 
are to be continuously available as the ornament and 
sustenance of life. So, again, with the virtues. To give 
the moment its acme of exaltation, virtue must be 
viewed not in its special or partial aspect as justice, 
benevolence, or fortitude, but in its supreme and per- 
vasive aspect as the outcome and expression of the 
divine mind. The whole philosophy contributes to the 
ascension and irradiation of the moment. 



CHAPTER VIII 

FORESHADOWINGS 

It is admitted on all hands that Emerson represents 
an extraordinary intellectual and moral development. 
That an extraordinary intellectual and moral develop- 
ment would almost necessarily readjust one's scale of 
values is a proposition that virtually everybody would 
concede. We have, then, in Emerson's superiority an 
adequate and available explanation for his difference 
from ourselves, but with curious and amusing unanimity 
everybody rejects this account of the matter, and as- 
sumes that Emerson's departures or divergences are 
aberrations. If a man finds the universe not quite so 
ugly as it appears to most of us, the purblind can see 
that his vision is defective. 

We wish to suggest in this concluding chapter the pos- 
sibility that Emerson was a synthesis and an anticipa- 
tion — an anticipation because he was a synthesis. We 
do not pretend to be able to prove the actuality of this 
proposition; we do not even claim access to any inward 
oracle which guarantees its accuracy for ourselves. Mere 
possibilities, however, are often worth looking at. Prog- 
ress springs largely out of the synthesis in the individ- 
ual of traits or tendencies that in cruder periods had to 
find a lodgment in distinct and divergent personalities. 
The world grows when strength and virtue, muscle and 
brain, courage and prudence, liberality and piety, lib- 



FORESHADOWINGS 361 

erty and law, become capable of circumscription within 
the rim of a single personality. We wish to suggest that 
a larger arc of the great hoop which we call the universe 
found accommodation in the soul of Emerson than in 
that of almost any other known denizen of the planet. 
Let us glance, for instance, at the three great desider- 
ata of enlightened man, truth, beauty, and goodness 
with its companion and support, religion. Men differ as 
to the relative worth of these aims. It seems clear, that 
if equality be impossible, that one of the three is entitled 
to the ascendant whose supremacy will least compro- 
mise and obstruct the free development of the two 
others. Now Emerson, in so far as he made a distinction, 
put religion and ethics first, but by making both intel- 
lectualism and beauty the feeders or commissaries to 
religion and its ally, he made the higher power security 
for the expansion and ascent of its subordinates. Artists, 
and perhaps intellectualists, will complain of Emerson's 
religious bias. But, after all, has he not made the best 
division of honor and authority hitherto known among 
the three great claimants to the allegiance of mankind? 
Does not his system offer far more scope and counte- 
nance to the sentiment of beauty than the system of 
Theophile Gautier or Walter Pater, for example, offers 
to the religious and moral sense? Does it not encourage 
intellectualism far more zealously and effectively than 
the systems of Francis Bacon and Herbert Spencer 
encourage piety? The very results are eloquent. Not 
every devotee of art has added equally to the world's 
store of beauty, and how many idolaters of mind can 
we count whose contributions to thought would not be 



362 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

laughable beside those of this champion of the almighti 
ness of virtue? Is not Emerson's method on the who' 
the most pertinent suggestion that has been offered f 
modern times to aid the world in its ultimate grappi 
with the problem of the comparative worthiness of thes 
forces? The headship granted to religion may impres 
certain minds as puritanic and provincial, and its justice 
cannot be summarily proved. Still in an age of widening 
generalization and mellowing sentiment, it seems far 
from impossible that the reverential and affectionate 
study of the supreme generality may become the ulti- 
mate business of mankind. 

Two impulses have divided the world in the choice 
between secularity and religion. The East, as Emerson 
has explained in his "Plato," wanted religion so much 
that it was content, at great loss to itself, to be solitary, 
contemplative, self-effacing. The West loved the active, 
the varied, the liberal, the self -evocative, and these ends 
committed it to the culture of secularity. Plato may 
have spanned the chasm for his own day, but with the 
advance of centuries the bridge has weakened and the 
chasm has enlarged. Where but in Emerson can we find 
a reverence for the solitary vision which exceeds that of 
the ascetic and devotee united with an esteem for the 
varied, palpable, objective fact, which the investigator 
or commercialist might recognize as adequate? The 
balance between the two opposite tendencies is pre- 
served by the restoration to every object as symbol of 
the value which it has lost as actuality. The soul, like 
the rivers that make deltas, pursues its way through 
many and divergent channels, but all these serve no 



FORESHADOWINGS 363 

other purpose than to widen and to diversify its eventual 
reunion with the sea. To speak without metaphor, the 
problem that grows out of the fact that religion is special 
while life is universal is solved by the discovery that the 
specialty is coextensive with the universe. 

There is another profound difficulty or contradiction 
which the champion of religion in our time must face. 
Religion is an attempt at fixation; it emphasizes the 
abiding, the unchangeable; the mark of the God, even 
in the crude faith, is immortality. So strong is this pre- 
dilection that the belief in God has conferred perma- 
nence or the shadow of permanence on things really 
external to itself, on vast aggregates of improbable fic- 
tion called myths, and still larger accumulations of 
baseless or laughable casuistry called theologies. But 
the fleetingness and uncertainty of things is an aspect of 
the cosmos which is felt in the earliest days by the least 
heedful observer and which the vogue of the historical 
method and the acceptance of the theory of evolution 
have brought into new prominence in modern times. 
The waters have been let loose; the once solid and stead- 
fast universe has become a flux of restlessly changing 
waves, and the spirit of man, like the dove in the Noa- 
chian deluge, flutters homelessly above the expanse of 
unbroken waters, finding no rest for the sole of its foot. 
The fluidity is twofold, marking both the fact itself and 
our view of the fact; we survey a running train from the 
vantage-ground of a moving automobile; we live amid 
changing estimates of changing things. 

The effect of these powerful influences is seen in the 
attitudes of eclecticism, of agnosticism, of scepticism, of 



364 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

relativity, attitudes which sometimes appear to govern 
minds in the measure of their range, their modernity, 
and their insight. An ample and generous recognition 
of this transiency and slipperiness both in the nature of 
things and in man's soul seems more and more a neces- 
sary ingredient in any estimate of the universe which 
shall satisfy the intellect of the coming man. But it 
seems equally true that the coming man who shall re- 
solve our problems will never content himself with a uni- 
verse a-tilt, a universe in cascade, so to speak; the crav- 
ing for permanence in some form cannot be jauntily 
evaded. Is there any known mind which foreshadows 
the desired combination so clearly as Emerson's.^ Who 
has felt more profoundly the evanescence and evasive- 
ness of things? He not only admits the fact cordially; he 
triumphs in the instability of the universe. In this end- 
less novelty, this perpetual flux, he finds the authentic 
evidence of the divine power; as in the Gospel narrative 
the god is revealed by his power to tread the waves. The 
life of religion is proved by its transformations, and 
scepticism, as the agent or condition of these vitalizing 
changes, is its generous and beneficent support. Yet 
Emerson was quite as firm in his insistence on a single 
unalterable reality as in his refusal to believe that any 
aspect or estimate of that reality could be final. Few 
men, it is true, are now capable of so delicate a recon- 
cilement of permanence with elasticity. But the world 
is still immature, and, the rarer the combination, the 
more precious is the demonstration of its possibility. 

Emerson's attitude toward pain has been the subject 
of much adverse comment from a world indisposed to 



FORESHADOWINGS S65 

give up the solace of exploiting its own sufferings. There 
has been, to many men, something wilful, almost inso- 
lent, in this indifference to the pests of life, as if one 
should whistle blithely in his shirt-sleeves in a morning 
when everybody else was shivering in his furs. But is 
it not conceivable that even this attitude may be pro- 
phetic? Is it not possible that preoccupation with intel- 
lectual and moral interests might reach a point which 
should reduce, or possibly remove, the significance of 
pain, and may not the prelude, the promise, of that 
happy transformation be legible in the attitude of Emer- 
son? The values we give to physical pain and pleasure, 
for instance, are commonly settled in infancy, when, in 
the absence of higher competitors, they appropriated 
the whole field. They thus acquired a strong prescrip- 
tive advantage, and when they appear in any strength 
in competition with psychical values, our instinct is to 
allow them the right of way. Is this allowance neces- 
sary, or is it a mere habit which the institution of a 
counter-habit could displace? Emerson has served his 
race by affording in his life and speech a genuine support 
to the latter alternative. The key-word, in his case, is 
not so much heroism, though his equipment of heroism 
was ample, as preoccupation. The bodily sensation 
found itself anticipated. It is easy to call this point of 
view fantastic or peculiar. But is it well to leave out of 
our review of possibilities the supposition that the pres- 
ent exception may become the future norm of the eman- 
cipated race, that the anaesthetics in the moral world 
may be intelligence and virtue? 
There is still another critical point in which Emerson 



366 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

displays an inclusiveness which may prefigure the recon- 
ciling efficacy of the future. The universe loves power; 
in its earlier evolution it loves nothing else; in the animal 
world, it visits weakness with the penalties of crime, and 
distributes recompense and success on principles which 
would to-day brand a nation as barbarous or a man as 
criminal. Yet, singularly enough, in the very act of 
obeying, almost of lackeying, power, it begets and fos- 
ters other objects between which and its earlier aim the 
opposition is implacable. It upholds and glorifies vio- 
lence, yet nothing can dissuade it from the negligent and 
desultory but patient, and, in its own shuffling and par- 
tial fashion, invincible pursuit of moral ends. One might 
almost say that it exalts violence as a lordly and gallant 
accomplishment while it fosters Christianity with the 
hangdog and shamefaced persistence with which one 
practises an underhand vice. 

This division of ideals, this fissure in the universe, is 
not remedied by the advance of civilization. Civiliza- 
tion, indeed, reverts fondly to the rude strength of the 
primitive instincts which its weakness idealizes. Its 
central scientific doctrine, the hypothesis of evolution, 
reveals in the cosmos a quite undivined subservience to 
the rule of physical health and energy. The successes of 
Napoleon and Bismarck reveal the tenacity of its ancient 
instincts; it finds dervishes like Nietzsche and even seers 
like Carlyle to uphold the sacredness of the gospel of 
force. Yet the claims of morality are undisplaced. It 
seems clear that the two elements are irreconcilable, and 
yet that their reconciliation is imperative in the final 
disposition which the perplexed human race shall make 



FORESHADOWINGS 367 

of this unruly problem. We are confronted with two 
intransigeants, an Austria-Hungary, so to speak, two 
antagonists to be solidified into an empire. 

The attitude of Emerson in this regard is singular and 
remarkable. That a man of no bodily force, of uncertain 
constitution, of retiring and unaggressive habits, com- 
mitted by ancestral prescription and by individual pref- 
erence to the doctrine of the unshared and unbounded 
supremacy of the moral sentiment, should have been 
able so far to circumvent his own limitations, to tran- 
scend his own hemisphere, as to sympathize with ele- 
mental and unchastened power is a fact that strikes the 
thoughtful beholder with an emotion not untinged with 
awe. That Emerson effected no logical adjustment of 
the claims of these antagonists is very clear and very 
natural; but their mere co-existence in a single mind dis- 
closes or at least suggests in that mind a share in the 
profundity of the universe. 

There is another synthesis which is possibly only the 
foregoing synthesis surveyed from another point of view; 
but that point of view is so strongly marked and so 
weighty as to justify a separate exposition. The cosmic 
God is obviously a very different personage from the 
God whom man has expressed or distilled from his ethi- 
cal meditations. The power that launches earthquakes 
and arms cuttle-fish has but meagre relation to the 
power that blesses infants and forgives enemies. Now 
in recent times the desire, even the need, of integrating 
the universe by the consolidation of these two powers 
has been increasingly felt by religious minds, and the 
divergence of the ideas has proved an obstacle to their 



368 RALPH WALDO EMERSON ^ 

assimilation. An interesting if illogical expedient waST 
found. The powers were amalgamated, but not the 
character, and the character of the ethical God in the 
milder and loftier forms of Christianity was transferred 
almost without change to the common representative of 
aboriginal force and Christian principle. The trouble- 
some data were pushed aside or explained away; the facts 
might be authentic, but authoritative they were not; 
they must be dismissed as illusions or anomalies or coer- 
cions, as libellous in their consequence, however accurate 
in detail. It is clear that such a stand is unsafe if it be 
not cowardly. To take a further step, to assign unflinch- 
ingly to the universe the quality denoted by its own acts, 
to reconstruct the notion of Providence with a view of 
finding room in it for the rigors and barbarities which 
darken the annals of the world and yet to keep it the 
abiding and rightful object of the admiration and affec- 
tion of mankind, here was a task which required that 
precise combination of benevolence, austerity, and cour- 
age for which Emerson was noteworthy. 

That Emerson effected a logical combination of the 
two antagonistic ideas it would be puerile to imagine. 
The service he performed was psychological. He proved 
that the affection commonly granted to mildness could 
be rendered to severity, or rather to an association of 
severity and tenderness which might be defined in a 
single word as Dantesque. It is hardly too much to say 
that he found the sternness of the universe endearing. 
"The terrific benefactor" who is not to be dressed up 
in the "clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in 
divinity" is an image that all but sets him in a glow. 



FORESHADOWINGS S69 

Many men have rejoiced to find in a stern God the arm 
or weapon of their own vindictiveness, but the signifi- 
cant point in Emerson is the domestication and fraterni- 
zation of this idea with the humane band of benignant 
and charitable sentiments. 

Physically, Emerson was rather sound than strong, 
but the mark of his moral constitution was robustness, 
and robustness has its own standards of comfort and 
wellbeing which seem like anomalies and paradoxes to 
infirmity. To the relaxed natives of the emasculate 
tropics, it is beyond reason or conception that the sons 
of hardier climates should find content, even health, 
friendliness, and exhilaration, in the lowered tempera- 
ture and frosty winds before which their imaginations 
shrink and crouch. Why is it impossible to believe that 
some future age, conscious of a deep love at the world's 
core, might learn to rejoice rather than repine at the 
failure of that love to express itself in the nerveless forms 
of anxious solicitude or fondhng tenderness.^ 

"Plants and birds and humble creatures 
Well accept her rule austere; 
Titan-born, to hardy natures 
Cold is genial and dear." 

It is conceivable that Emerson's attitude may turn out 
to be, not the delusion of a sanguine and credulous mind, 
but the prophecy of the final attitude of mankind after 
it has put aside both the vindictiveness and savagery 
of Calvinism and what may seem to its corrected and 
clarified vision the mawkishness and unctuousness of 
latter-day Christianity. The demonstration of these 
ideas is impracticable: they belong to the class of sug- 



370 RALPH WALDO EMEESON 



^ 



gestions and possibilities, to the source, in other words, 
of human nature's most penetrating and vivifying ex- 
perience. 

The mixture of plaintiveness and indignation with 
which Emerson's so-called optimism is received by cau- 
tious thinkers is a curious proof of the affectionate re- 
gard in which the human race holds its despondencies 
and discouragements. Who is this upstart who has pre- 
sumed to think generously of life and his kind? One 
might suggest that it was creditable to our poor dam- 
aged universe to have been able to play the role of uni- 
versal benefactor for one enlightened spirit without 
breaking down in the attempt. Is it necessary to de- 
prive the cosmos of the rare honor of having justified 
itself to the mind and heart of one of the noblest and 
profoundest of its sons? If the optimism is peculiar, let 
us not forget that there is one class of peculiarities which 
the improvement of the race is destined to render 
universal. 

The hfe of Emerson seems, in its way, to have fore- 
shadowed the conditions under which it is probable that 
the maximum of happiness may be secured for human 
nature. Those conditions were humihty, early stoicism, 
fortitude, the release from the selfish ambitions which 
divide and distract mankind, wide and eager curiosity, 
intense intellectual activity, preoccupation with the 
inward life, concentration on the present as the type of 
the eternal. If his field seems restricted and peculiar, we 
must not forget that his special task was to restore a 
general character to all specialties, to indicate certain 
inspirations and elevations to which occupations of 



FORESHADOmNGS 371 

every class are permeable or porous. The minimization 
of pain and the concentration of desire on non-competi- 
tive benefits would seem in themselves to remove more 
than half of the visible obstacles to the amelioration of 
the status of the race. 

Emerson's influence is a subject for discriminating 
study. The pointed and profound observations he 
dropped incidentally on miscellaneous subjects have 
been caught up eagerly by the saner public. His char- 
acter as evinced in his books and in his hfe has been a 
high and salutary influence. What more are we to say.^^ 
The frequent and not improbable assertion that his main 
office was stimulative or fertilizing includes, while it 
obscures, the half-reluctant acknowledgment that his 
major ideas as ideas have found no wide acceptance in 
the hearers of his own time or in their posterity. He did 
not seek disciples in the common sense, and the one 
phase of discipleship which would have been welcome — 
the establishment at his instance in other minds of inde- 
pendent centres of access to the divine power — has yet 
to prove its existence on a large scale to the critical stu- 
dent. The teaching was high, but the pupils were unripe. 
Emerson was in the position of a young man of twenty- 
three, who, in the manly elation of his first pecuniary 
independence, should urge self-support on audiences of 
boys varying from four to fourteen years. The advice 
would be manifestly impracticable, yet the self-support 
— so bhndly yet so f ar-seeingly urged — might be the 
true ideal and eventual destiny of each one of the imma- 
ture auditors. To make the analogy just for the actual 
influence of Emerson, we must put decades or centuries 



372 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



^ 



instead of years, and let each boy stand for a suite of 
generations. 

The illustration may be drawn upon for a second 
instructive particular. The supposition that parental 
support was withdrawn from these boys before their 
capacity for seK-help had matured will suggest aptly 
enough the effect of the decease of puritanism on the 
minds naturally receptive of the Emersonian doctrine 
of seK-rehance. The phenomenon called Emerson was 
composed of two elements, — the absorption of puri- 
tanism and the estrangement from puritanism. The 
duplication of the phenomenon depended on the trans- 
mission of the two constituents, but Emerson trans- 
mitted only the second. The old-time faith to which he 
had owed so much passed from maturity to decadence 
with tragic certainty and swiftness. A rhetorician would 
say that he was himseK the occasion of the decline, that 
the plant perished in consequence of the effort it put 
forth in the creation of its flower. Putting aside such 
flourishes, it is clear that the followers were in no condi- 
tion to forego the aid which had proved indispensable 
to the training of the master, that that aid was in fact 
withdrawn, and that Emerson himself was a visible 
occasion, if not in the last analysis, an active cause of 
its withdrawal. 

The result has been very curious. Here was a man 
built to exert a rare influence upon a certain kind of 
highly sensitive and clarified human material. That 
material, almost in the course of his own lifetime, is 
virtually removed from the world, and removed by 
influences to which he himself was a conspicuous and 



FORESHADOWINGS 373 

it may be, a powerful contributor. The effect of the 
teacher cannot be wholly balked, but it is forced to 
creep out through secondary outlets, to percolate 
through devious, underground, and casual ways, to take 
shape as chance suggestion, as moral impregnation, or 
as quickener and vitalizer in some mysterious fashion 
which it is easier to revere than to measure. The world 
adopts Emerson's sagacities, chants his verses, savors 
his pungencies, and reveres his character: meanwhile it 
ignores his philosophy: he is at the same time honored 
and forsaken. 

The future, be it remembered, is intact. Emerson's 
jame arrived punctually, and shows no sign of diminu- 
tion, but his influence, the influence of his central ideas 
and impulsions, has been curiously prorogued. A hiatus 
has occurred in the evolution of his power, springing out 
of an unreadiness on the world's part for the reception 
of his ideas which the last fifty years seem rather to have 
increased than abated. Humanity must receive a new 
and profound charge of the religious spirit before its real 
pupilage to the waiting master can begin. At the present 
instant he is hardly in the strong sense a teacher, hardly 
in the strong sense an example: he is a revelation of 
capacity, an adjourned hope, an unassured but mo- 
mentous foreshadowing. 



THE END 



INDEX 



Action, E.'s view of, 308-09. 

Albert, Prince, 123. 

Alcott, Bronson, 85-87, 94, 104; 

Fruitlands, 105-08. 
Alcott, Louisa, 86. 
"American Civilization," 300. 
"American Scholar," 71, 160-61, 

308-09. 
Arnold, Matthew, 229, 257, 258, 

278, 281. 
"Art" (I), 190-91, 256. 
"Art" (II), 223, 300-01. 
Austen, Jane, 229, 233. 

Bacon, Francis, 230, 361. 

"Beauty," 220-21, 223. 

"Behavior," 219. 

Behmen, Jacob, 230. 

Bliss, Daniel, 2. 

Bonaparte, Napoleon, 199. See 

also "Napoleon." 
"Books," 222-23. 
"Boston," 226. 
"Boston Hymn," 141-42. 
Bradford, Samuel, 12. 
Brook Farm, 101-05. 
Brownell, W. C, 274-75. 
Bulkeley, Peter, 1, 53. 
Burroughs, John, 146. 

Cabot, James Elliot, 95, 129, 152, 
154. 

Cacophonies, 262. 

California, 145. 

Carlyle, Jane, 116, 126-29. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 39, 40, 41-42, 
61-71, 113, 114, 116, 117, 122, 
126-29, 150, 173, 209, 225, 231, 
240, 257, 258, 268, 366. 

Channing, William Ellery (the 
poet), 94. 

Chapel attendance, 147. 

"Character," 192, 193. 



Christian Examiner, 74. 

"Circles," 188, 189. 

"Civihzation," 222. 

Clarke, James Freeman, 156 

Clearness, 234. 

"Clubs," 223. 

Coherence, 234-39. 

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 39, 40, 

42, 230, 319. 
"Comic, The," 224. 
Compensation, 233, 326. 
"Compensation," 176-77, 179, 

191, 234, 239. 
Concord, 45, 52-53. 
Condensation, 256-57. 
"Conduct of Life," 129, 215-21, 

222. 
Conflux (of truth, beauty, etc.), 

302-04, 361-62. 
"Conservative, The," 170-71, 

301. 
"Considerations by the Way," 

220. 
Consistency, 311. 
Conway, Moncure D., 148. 
"Cornwall, Barry," 126. > 
"Courage," 223. 
Criticism, E.'s, 229-34. 
"Culture," 219. 
Culture of E., 227-29. 

Dante, 233. 

Decay of faculties, 152-55. 

De Quincey, Thomas, 121, 124. 

Dial, The, 95-101. 

Dickens, Charles, 123, 209, 229. 

Diction of E., M<i-^^. 

"Divinity School Address," 161- 

66. 
"Domestic Life," 222, 223. 

Egypt, 150. 
Eliot, George, 124. 



376 



INDEX 



"Eloquence," 224. 

Emerson, Charles Chauncy, 4, 9, 
21, 34, 37, 57. 

Emerson, Edward Bliss, 4, 9, 21, 
28-29, 37, 57. 

Emerson, Edward Waldo, 12, 30, 
149-50, 154. 

Emerson, Edith (Mrs. William H. 
Forbes), 109, 119-20, 130, 143, 
153. 

Emerson, Ellen T. (daughter), 
108-09, 111, 130, 149, 153. 

Emerson, Ellen Tucker (wife), 
29-31, 36. 

Emerson, Joseph, 2. 

Emerson, Lydia Jackson, 45, 46, 
50-52, 76, 77. 

Emerson, Mary Moody, 4, 7-8, 53, 
94, 225, 257. 

Emerson, Phebe, 4, 93-94. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, birth, 1; 
schooling, 11-12; college, 13-14; 
school-keeping, 17-18; school 
in mother's house, 18-20; stud- 
ies at Divinity Hall, 21 ; appro- 
bated to preach, 21 ; acceptance 
of ministry, 21-23; Southern 
trip, 24-25; strolling, 26; court- 
ship and first marriage, 29-30; 
pastorate of Second Unitarian 
Church, 31; preaching, 31-33; 
disagreement with church, 33- 
36; grief for loss of wife, 36-37; 
embarks for Europe, 37; Italy, 
37-39; need of companions, 39; 
visits to Landor, Coleridge, 
Wordsworth, Carlyle, 38-42; 
enamored of moral perfection, 
43; debt to Europe, 43-44; 
lands in New York, 45; preach- 
ing, 46-47; lectures, 47-50; 
house and land, 54-55; conserv- 
atism in materialities, 56-57; 
relation to brothers, 57-58; 
grief for Charles, 58-60; publi- 
cation of "Nature," 60-61; 
birth of son Waldo, 61-62; 
"American Scholar," 71; "Di- 
vinity School Address," 71-82; 
letter to Henry Ware, 79; edits 



Dial, 95; writes prospectus, 96, 
97; contributes articles, 98-99; 
dislikes editing, 101; attitude 
toward Brook Farm, 103-05; 
household reforms, 107-08; 
birth of daughter Ellen, 108-09; 
grief for Waldo, 11 1-13; goes to 
Europe, 115; visits Carlyle, 116; 
lectures in English provinces, 
117-20; in Scotland, 121; visits 
London, 121-24; varied curi- 
osity, 118-19; sympathy with 
poverty, 119-20; visits France, 
124-25; lectures in Portman 
Square, London, 126; sails for 
America, 129; joins in Anti-slav- 
ery movement, 130-43; letter to 
Martin Van Buren, 131-32; 
need of money, 143; trip to Cali- 
fornia, 145; visits West Point, 
145-46; elected Harvard Over- 
seer, 146; fire in house, 148; tes- 
timonial from friends, 149; 
third visit to Europe, 149-51; 
return to Concord, 151; illness 
and death, 155-56; funeral, 156. 
Culture, 227-29; critical fac- 
ulty, 229-34; clearness, 234; 
coherence, 234-39; English, 
239-42; diction, 242-44; literary 
unbendings, 242-49; hyperboles, 
249-52; word-play, 252-53; 
metaphor, 253-55; epigram, 
255; condensation, 256-57; flo- 
ridity, 257-59; rhythm, 260-62; 
polarity (in style), 263-64 ; style, 
264-68; inhibitions (in style), 
268-72; poetry, 274-96; logic, 
298-302; sensibility, 305-06. 

"Farming," 222. 
"Fate," 217-18. 
Fire in house, 148. 
Floridity of E., 257-59. ' 
Flux, 327-29, 339, 363-64. 
Forbes, John M., 144-45. 
Forbes, William H., 143-44. 
Foreshadowings (of E.'s influence), 

360-73. 
France, 124. 



INDEX 



377 



French words, 242. 
"Friendship," 182-84. 
Froude, James Anthony, 123. 
Fugitive Slave Law, 135-37. 
Fruitlands, 105-07, 110. 
Fuller, Margaret (Countess Osso- 
li), 82-85, 94, 95, 97, 101, 104. 
Furness, W. H., 12, 95. 

Gautier, Theophile, 361. 

Gay, Martin, 16. 

** Gifts," 192. 

God, 334, 336, 355-56, 367-69. 

See also Over-Soul. 
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang fvon, 

20, 196, 207-08, 230. 
Gould, Benjamin A., 11. 
Government, view of, 347. 
"Greatness," 224. 

Harvard College, IS, 71-82, pas- 
sim; 146-47, 225> 226. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 88-89, 
229; his Donatello, 90. 

Herbert, George, 230, 231. 

"Heroism," 185-86, 190. 

HiU, John B., 20. 

"Historic Notes of Life and Let- 
ters in New England," 225. 

"History," 174, 176, 179, 256. 

Hoar, E. Rockwood, 149, 156. 

Hoar, Samuel, 225- 

Holmes, John, 150. 

Homer, 232. 

Hunt, Leigh, 124. 

Hyperbole, 249-52. 

Idealism, 343-44. 
Identity, 341-42. 
Illusion, 321-22. 
"Illusions," 221, 223. 
Immortality, 317-18. 
"Immortality," 224-25, 318. 
Influence of E., 371-73. 
Inhibitions (in style), 268-72. 
Insecurity, 356-58. 
"Inspiration," 224. 
Instincts, 314-15. 
"Intellect," 189-90. 
Ireland, Alexander, 115. 



Jonson, Ben, 231, 373. 

Kant, Immanuel, 64. 
Kemble, Fanny, 123. 
Keyes, Miss (Mrs. Edward Emer- 
son), 154. 

Landor, Walter Savage, 39, 40, 
42 230. 

"Landor,* Walter Savage," 226. 

Lane, Charles, 105, 106. 

Lectures, 47-50. 

Lectures, Portman Square, Lon- 
don, 126. 

"Lectures and Biographical 
Sketches," 225.^ 

"Letters and Social Aims," 129, 
223-25. 

Lincoln, Abraham, 141, 142, 145. 

"Literary Ethics," 166-67. 

Logic, 298-302. 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 
153. 

Love, 352-54. 

"Love," 179-82, 353. 

Lovejoy, Owen P., 185-86. 

Lowell, Francis Cabot, 149. 

Lowell, James Russell, 150. 

Lyon, Lawson, 11. 

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 

124, 235-36. 
Macready, William C, 123. 
Magic, 331-33, 339, 346. 
Magnifiers, 333-35. 
"Man the Reformer," 169-70. 
"Manners," 192. 
Massachusetts Quarterly Review, 

129. 
Mechanism, 323, 325-27. 
Meredith, George, 285. 
Metaphor, 253-55. 
"Method of Nature," 167-69, 

329. 
"Michael Angelo," 226. 
Milnes, Richard Monckton, 122, 

123. 
"Milton," 226. 
Milton, John, 258. 
"Montaigne," 196, 199, 201-03. 



378 



INDEX 



Montaigne, Michel de, 231. 
Moody, Samuel, 2. 
Moralists, 351. 
Murat, Achille, 25. 

"Napoleon," 196, 206-07, 357. 
"Natural History of Intellect," 

225—26. 
"Nature," 60-61, 157-60. 
"New England Reformers,'* 192. 
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 366. 
"Nominalist and Reahst," 192, 

195-96. 
Norton, Andrews, 74-75. 
Norton, Charles Eliot, 74, 145. 

"Old Age," 222. 
Optimism, 370. 
Ossoli, Angelo, 84. 
Over-Soul, 337-41. 
"Over-Soul," 177, 182, 184, 186- 

188, 189, 191, 223, 318, 329, 

340. 

Pain, 348-49, 364-65. 

Palfrey, John Gorham, 138. 

Parable, 282-84. 

Parallelism, 342-43. 

Paris, 124, 125, 150. 

Parker, Theodore, 129-30. 

Parnassus, 153. 

"Past and Present," 226. 

Pater, Walter, 361. 

Peabody, Elizabeth, 75-76. 

"Persian Poetry," 224. 

Phillips, Wendell, 133. 

Plato, 230, 231, 309, 339, 353. 

"Plato," 196, 198-200, 362. 

Plotinus, 231, 309. 

Plutarch, 231. 

Poems, first issue, 114. 

"Poet, The," 192-93. 

Poet, E. as, 274-96. 

"Poetry and Imagination," 224. 

Polarity, 263-64. 

"Politics," 192. 

Possibility, 330-31. 

"Power," 218. 

"Progress of Culture," 224. 

Prose-writer, E. as, 227-73. 



"Prudence," 184-85. 
Puritanism, 310. 
Pythologians, 15. 

"Quotation and Originality," 224. 

Reason, 318-21. 
"Representative Men," 129, 196- 

227. 
"Resources," 224. 
Rhetoric, 335-37. 
Rhythm (in prose), 260-62. 
Richter, Jean Paul, 250. 
Ripley, Ezra, 53, 94, 225. 
Ripley, George, 95, 103-04. 
Ripley, Samuel, 94. 
Ripley, Sarah Alden Bradford, 

93-94. 
Robinson, Crabb, 122-23. 
Russell, LeBaron, 149. 

Saturday Club, 46, 147-48. 
Scott, David, 121. 
Scott, Walter, 232. 
Self-reliance, 313-16, 340-41, 355- 

56. 
"Self -Reliance," 173, 175-76, 191, 

234 340. 
Sensibility, 305-06. 
Shakers, 88. 
Shakespeare, William, 230, 232, 

254, 258, 278, 336-37. 
"Shakespeare," 196, 203-06. 
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 209, 229, 

233, 278, 305. 
Single thought, 297-98, ei seq. 
"Social Aims," 224. 
Social Reforms, 68-71. 
Society, 344-47, 358. 
"Society and SoHtude," 129, 221- 

23. 
Socrates, 199, 203. 
Space (and time), 316-18. 
Species (in verse), 287-88. 
Spencer, Herbert, 361. 
Spiritualism, 332. 
"Spiritual Laws," 175, 176, 177- 

79, 184. 
Stearns, George L., 225. 
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 275. 



INDEX 



379 



Sterling, John, 95, 209. 
Style, 264-68. 
"Success," 222. 
**Swedenborg," 196, 200-01. 
Swedenborg, Emanuel, 253-54. 
Syntheses, 360-61. 

Tennyson, Alfred, 123, 209. 

"Terminus," 152, 

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 

209, 268. 
Thoreau, Henry David, 89-92, 

94, 99, 225. 
Time (and space), 316-19. 
"Times" (lecture), 170. 
Times, The London (newspaper), 

211-13. 
Totality (in poetry), 294-96. 
Transcendental Club, 66-67. 
Transcendentalism, 63-71. 
"Transcendentalist," 171-72. 

Unbendings (literary), 242-49. 
Understanding, 319-21. 



Unitarianism, 64, 65, 72-74, 312- 

13. 
Universality, 306-10. 
"Uses of Great Men," 196, 197- 



Versification, 276-79. 
Virtues, 354-56. 

War, 139-41. 

Ware, Henry, 31, 77-79. 95. 

"Wealth," 218. 

Webster, Daniel, 28, 135-38. 

Wilson, John, 121. 

Woodberry, George E., 275. 

Word-play, 253. 

Wordsworth, William, 39, 40, 42, 

121, 209, 304. 
"Works and Days," 223. 
"Worship," 219-20. 
Wright, Henry C, 105. 

"Young American," 172. 



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